Move Over Firefox, I Choose Chrome

[Rob Williams]

I can't believe I'm about to say this, but after eight years of remaining faithful to Mozilla's Firefox, I've decided to move over to Google's Chrome, after much testing and experimentation. The first time I used Firefox, I was blown away by its speed and stability, and back in its earlier years, those were the main reasons I recommended it to everyone else.

Read the rest of our news post here and discuss it here!

 

[DarkStarr]

How odd, I have like 50+ FF tabs open and it never crashes, seems like you may have some other problem there.

Actually to be exact I have only 43 tabs right now but I do get more sometimes.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Actually, it’s to do with the sites as well. For me, photobucket can cause me to reboot through firefox, no warning or event log entry, just a *poof* and I’m posting again. Chrome, IE, it doesn’t happen. Some versions of Firefox it’s completely stable, other times it’s very unstable. If I come across a site with a lot of scripting going on, then firefox becomes a massive memory hog, 400MB memory and 600MB Virtual memory should not be normal for 12 tabs after 1 hour browsing.

I guess if you don’t keep an eye on things and just use it as it is, you won’t notice. When you start to compare it to other browsers, you begin to see the problems. I to have been a long standing firefox user and I don’t like what’s happened to it since version 3. I really do want firefox to come back with some fire in its tail again with 4.0. Quite a few people pointed out problems when 3.0 was released, many of those problems have been patched away – most of them with the scripting engine, to which will be replaced in 4.0. So I haven’t lost all hope, just have to be patient. If 4.0 is a bit of a flop, then yeah, I may consider changing.

 

[Doomsday]

Firefox is better for development purposes though(?), me thinks, Firebug tool is really good!

 

[slugbug]

Lately Adobe Flash Player has been crashing in Firefox for me.

 

[Glider]

I too switched to Chrome (and Chromium on my work desktop) last week... I did it because Firefox just was too slow in starting up. I had loading times up to 45 seconds, which is just TOO much...

Firefox became a victim of its own succes... It went from a "good and stable" browser to a bloat infested collection of gimmick features...

 

[Kougar]

Hm. Good luck with the changeover!

I wanted to ditch Opera given their 10.50 series of builds broke a great deal of functionality (and introduced some serious bugs) for no apparent reason. That forced myself and a great many other users to stick with 10.10 which suffered from zero HTML5 support, was having scripting issues with some sites, and had some serious security holes in it. Yet I couldn't get Firefox configured even reasonably close to its layout or functionality, so I just stuck with Opera 10.10...

Today or so Opera released version 10.60, and much of the functionality has been restored in addition to the new .50 series features. So far 10.60 appears to now work perfectly with HTML5 video, has much faster scripting over .50, and even those annoying Google map hyperlink issues were resolved.

 

[GFreeman]

I am too a dedicated Firefox user. Also because there are lot of useful addons available for Firefox. The bug I have once in a while is that you close Firefox and try to start it again. The firefox.exe process is sometimes still running and taking 100% cpu usage with a single core, 50% with a dual core. I have to end the process to be able to start Firefox normally again. This is quite annoying. It could also be one of these bugs. I have seen this bug happening on multiple PC's.

 

[Kougar]

I am too a dedicated Firefox user. Also because there are lot of useful addons available for Firefox. The bug I have once in a while is that you close Firefox and try to start it again. The firefox.exe process is sometimes still running and taking 100% cpu usage with a single core, 50% with a dual core. I have to end the process to be able to start Firefox normally again. This is quite annoying. It could also be one of these bugs. I have seen this bug happening on multiple PC's.

That's usually not a bug as much as the result of an add-on. If you do some work you can likely narrow down which add-on is causing that problem and uninstall or replace it with one that works properly. Stuff like that is exactly why I don't still use Firefox and their add-on system, I just got tired of doing it after every 3rd or 4th version update!

 

[GFreeman]

That's usually not a bug as much as the result of an add-on. If you do some work you can likely narrow down which add-on is causing that problem and uninstall or replace it with one that works properly. Stuff like that is exactly why I don't still use Firefox and their add-on system, I just got tired of doing it after every 3rd or 4th version update!

It also happened with a plained clean installed Firefox without addons. Every once in a while, but not often.

 

[Kougar]

If I install a clean version of Firefox, automatically it picks up Java and Skype add-ons and about a dozen plug-ins. Office 2007 plug-ins, Foxit Reader, Java, WMP, several NVIDIA plugins, Shockwave, Silverlight, Winamp, and still more. And it even has a plugin titled "Mozilla Default Plug-in 1.0.0.15 - Default Plug-in", whatever the hell that is.

If it only happens on that single PC, have you manually deleted all Mozilla folders/settings that are left behind and not removed after an uninstall? Sometimes that can also be the culprit if a old settings or profile file was damaged.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Just updated Firefox to 3.6.8 and it became unusable as a result of visiting a single website.... I'll let the screencap explain why.....

Tabs left to right = Application Process, CPU Usage, Current Memory, Peak Memory, Virtual Memory, Page Faults. (high page faults is normal). So 1.5GB of ram for one Tab, fun.

That is Firefox, not the plugin manager causing problems. It stayed like that indefinitely, I could tab between windows, but if I changed tabs, nothing would happen. This was caused by a Forum for a game site. I closed FF, restarted it, closed the offending tab, no more problems. My guess is the active clock on the top part of the page caused problems, but still checking....

As far as my experience goes with Chrome Vs. Firefox over the last couple weeks, Yes, Chrome is faster and snappier, the trade off is massive memory usage. 2 Windows and 20 Tabs with Firefox is about 200-300MB, same situation with Chrome is closer to 1GB.... Chrome is so fast because it keeps everything in memory, which is fine if you have plenty of it, but for someone like me with only 2GB, it makes doing anything else a lot more difficult. I Switched chrome to my default now, simply because it starts up faster than FIrefox, which means when someone sends me or I click on a link, it's open instantly. For my general browsing and research, i'm sticking to Firefox due to its much smaller memory footprint, allowing me to actually do work at the same time.

 

[madmat]

I tried Chrome and it was too spartan for my liking. Stuck with Ff after that. Never had Firefox cause a spontaneous reboot though.