There is nothing inherent in the design of A hypothetical browser that would make it slower over time, its just a matter of people make assumptions and those assumptions are often wrong, and then performance suffers.
Some things do accumulate. That is in fact the point of Firefox Reset[1].
The support page lists "Extensions and themes, website-specific preferences, search engines, download history, DOM storage, security settings, download actions, plugin settings, toolbar customizations, user styles and social features will be removed."
Installing extensions can dramatically slow down browsers. I wonder if the lack of extensions is responsible for the quickness users experience with a fresh install.
Absolutely – there's really common cycle I see repeated all over:
1. “(Firefox|Chrome) is slow”
2. “Did you try removing Ad-Block Plus, etc.?”
3. “Now it's fast again!”
I think we're well past the point where the browsers are going to need to start having some UI around monitoring and exposing slow extensions to make it easier for users to learn this.
Absolutely. When I first starting using FF and all the developer tools, it would grind to a halt. Now that I'm a lot more comfortable with the FF toolset, I have a minimal set of extensions and it feels much snappier.
I also use Aurora which is still super fast to me. I also develop with Chrome Canary and the stable Chrome version. Canary has times when its totally useless or when someone breaks the build and I can't use it for a week so until the next update comes out.
All in all, yes, less overhead means a snappier browser to me.
That's my biggest reason for switching from AdBlock+ to Privoxy + https://github.com/skroll/privoxy-adblock . Same blocking rules but uses a ton less memory, since each tab isn't running all of AB+ .
That's fine for image and flash ads, but provides no support for CSS blocking of elements. My understanding is that the CSS blocking is the slowest part, too.
