

Dear Firefox, I feel sad about you. - deepak-kumar

I have been in web app development since 2008 and have used PHP, Python, ROR, Javascript, HTML, CSS etc with my most favorite browser Firefox and I always loved it. But now FF is not in my favorite browser list instead I just use it for testing purposes to see if things working or not just like you keep testing your app on IE7,8,9 etc.<p>I did not even realize that since last 18 months or so I am using only Chrome and dear Firefox I was not missing you. I got everything in Chrome I needed (speed, dev tools, no browser crashing etc. etc.).<p>I did a bit of research and I did get to see rants about FF not doing well (and for chrome as well :P).<p>And now I don&#x27;t need Firefox anymore. I just want it to die like IE7. Some of you might say that I am cribbing and not helping FF to make it better.<p>I don&#x27;t know if there are more people like me who just use chrome as default browser and feel sad about FF.<p>I keep running both latest stable &amp; dev&#x2F;nightly builds of FF and chrome on my multiple machines but chrome outperforms everytime and at least I don&#x27;t feel the slowness.<p>Overall chrome ROCKS!
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daliusd
That's quite a rant :)

1\. My experience: I have not experienced Firefox being significantly slower
than Chrome. I personally do not notice anything. Firefox on Android works
amazingly (better than Chrome significantly). I have not seen Firefox crash
yet.

2\. Your experience: It is just a rant. You are not contributing anything good
to this world and the only good thing about your rant is understanding that
people might have your problem. Like Mozilla doesn't know this problem and has
not done anything towards that. You could have written the same rant more
positively, maybe with some metrics and ideally with analysis what must be
improved. Firefox is open source browser.

~~~
deepak-kumar
My intention was not to sound like rant but if I did then it's my bad. I
notice the issues with ubuntu a lot and I was big fan of it as mentioned above
but not anymore as you know the reason. I get paid for developing application
which work on browsers and not make browsers work fast. The point is big
number of devs won't be able to give their time to make browsers better but
that does not mean they can't say bad is bad.

~~~
daliusd
What Firefox version do you use? While I would expect from Ubuntu to update
firefox regularly.

~~~
deepak-kumar
FF 25.x.x and FF Nightly build 28.0a1 (2013-11-19). I do see some improvements
in latest dev builds.

~~~
daliusd
I don't have problems even with 25 version but again that might be very
individual: different sites, different projects and etc.

There is one little thing you can do: enable all reporting in Advanced
settings if you have not done that yet. Mozilla will get at least some
information that might be later used for browser improvements.

~~~
deepak-kumar
Thanks for reminding me the option and yeah with js heavy application/projects
FF is not doing well for me atleast.

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m_gloeckl
I've had a short fling with Chrome, when it was still fairly new and Firefox
suffered from severe performance issues (during the 3.6.x era).

Today's picture is a little different. Sure, on JS heavy web applications and
those optimized for Chrome (a few google maps based apps come to mind) Firefox
gets outperformed by Chrome significantly.

Considering browser extensions: I still feel that Chrome extensions lack in
functionality compared to their pendants on the Firefox platform. For example,
I have yet to find a good mouse gestures addon that can restore a closed tab
with its' history intact. I don't blame the addon authors, that seems to be
much more a problem with the API.

Memory usage with a lot of opened tabs is also an issue for me. On my own
machine at home, I do have a lot of spare memory, but at work not so much. I'm
a messy person when it comes to tabs, I leave a lot of them open and never
close them, because I might need to look up something later on. Firefox is
surprisingly memory-efficient (which was not always the case in the past) with
a lot of open tabs, while Chrome hogs memory like crazy. On my work machine,
it forces the OS to swap and the whole systems hangs frequently.

The last thing is customizability. If I don't like a particular behaviour on
Firefox, there's surely a way to change it. Be it keybindings or the amount of
lines I want to scroll with one tick of the mouse wheel (There's even a
possibility to set different settings for different modifier keys!), for most
things there's a setting or (thanks to the rich extension API) an addon that
does the job.

TL;DR: Chrome might be faster for some use cases, Firefox still thakes the
cake in the overall user experience discipline

PS: User experience and preference is subjective. Competition and choice are
good and everyone gets to use the tool of their choice.

~~~
deepak-kumar
I must agree to the fact that you can not blame addon authors for any slowdown
or memory usage.

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Lorenz-Kraft
Hi, i think you should try to deinstall ALL Plugins and ReRun your FF vs
Chrome experience. I had somehow the same issue with FF like crashing, being
slow etc. I didn't have the time to debug and investigate the problem, so i
tried a "blank" FF and everything was smooth again. I think the same will
happen very soon to my Chrome too. Most of the time its a stuck/brocken/badly
written plugin/extension. The software itself is very mature. If you
experience the same problem on MORE than one PC with a clean install, just
report it to FF with a description of the circumstances etc. They will fix it.

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cryptos
I like the emphasis of freedom in the Firefox philosophie, but I must admit
that I'm using Chrome more and more. This is simply because firefox has more
bugs annoying me. A few month ago there was a terrible font rendering bug in
FF for several versions. Chrome never had such bugs. It offers a great
userinterface with a unified location and search bar. It is fast. It has
amazing developer tools ... and so on. I want to like Firefox, but Chrome
makes it sometimes hard.

~~~
deepak-kumar
+1

