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Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

Months later, inbox.google.com still requires Chrome, despite it working perfectly well in Safari when spoofing the UA, and claims that it was held back by "performance issues on some animations", and while I've had a few occasional bugs running it in Firefox, it seemed to be altogether quite fine. Anyway I stopped using the thing a month ago because I simply dropped Chrome†.

† slowly becoming too much ChromeOS-and-why-not-a-browser (including terrible memory use) extending its tentacles in ugly ways into my desktop of choice.

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I'd like to take a moment to focus on that last point: Chrome has become the memory hog that caused us all to leave firefox but for the much more egregious reason of trying to be something it's not.

Now when I close chrome it wants to stay open like an over eager registry cleaner that hopes to hide behind the always on functionality and thus obscure that fact that it's done nothing, only Chrome's reason is the slightly more nefarious "we'll keep you informed while tracking all your desktop mouse movement" it also has the unintended consequence of making it difficult to restart the browser in cases of memory leaks.

And welcome Firefox OS.

For me, Chrome uses half the memory of Firefox for the same number of tabs. If you're having memory issues with a browser, your problem is almost certainly extensions - the #1 culprit being AdBlock [Plus]. Give µBlock a try. (The reason why my Firefox uses more memory per tab is in fact almost certainly extensions.)

I switched back to Firefox 18 months ago because Chrome was crashy and consumed too many resources. But you're right, switching from Adblock Edge to µBlock saved more RAM ;)

I was careful to not say that Firefox uses less memory than Chrome, because for me it doesn't but Chrome was sold (to me at least) on the promise of speed, which is no longer true.

Though I do use uBlock over the other two main adblockers.

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