It's endearing that for each comment presenting a criticism of some aspect of Firefox, there's at least one reply from somebody saying, "But /I/ don't have that problem" (see thaumaturgy's top-ranked post).
So great. You don't run into problem x or problem y.
But a LOT of people do. And when I sit down at somebody's computer, and they use Firefox, and they have more than a couple tabs open, it's slow. Inconceivably slow. Especially in light of how snappy Chrome manages to be with a big stack of tabs open.
And then on a modern computer, a nice shiny new computer, things are pausing erratically, and there's lag, and it's slow, and it feels like 2005.
I can hear you leaping to Firefox's defense now: "Sure, but that was only true until 5.323, when they fixed the 'FF is slow as shit' bug!" Or, "yes, but that has never happened to /me/, and I run Firefox on a Pentium I that I spilled a bunch of grape juice on and kick every day."
Congrats, you're either an anomaly, incredibly fortunate, or you limit your number of tabs, restart Firefox regularly, and clear out your history daily. All things that I can assure you, ordinary, non-technical people NEVER DO.
Chrome managed to make a browser that doesn't become unbearably slow under normal usage patterns. Firefox, for all its moral superiority (and I gladly concede that point), has never managed to do that.
The fact is, different people experience different things.
Many people report that Firefox holds up better with many tabs open than Chrome. Perhaps since Chrome has one process per tab, which ends up straining some OSes. And many people report the opposite. It probably depends a lot on the OS, the specific tabs, their number, what addons they have, etc.
There are definitely a variety of bugs that some Firefox users hit, and those users get a frustrating experience. I don't think anyone is denying that. But there are also plenty of users that are clearly very happy. And there are users of other browsers that also hit bugs - for example I recently noticed that Opera was churning my HD for no reason. Never seen that on any browser until then. I had to stop using Opera because of it.
"Especially in light of how snappy Chrome manages to be with a big stack of tabs open."
Numerous benchmarks show that since 5 FF performs far better with a large number of tabs (100+ for example) compared to Chrome. This happens to be my use case so FF is my choice. Tab groups is also a must with so many tabs.
I don't use tabs in any browser, never have, never will. Open preferences, and turn off tabs -- easy. I don't see the need for tabs when the OS provides it's own tabs for all the windows I have regardless of whether it's a web page or not. Tabs within tabs, no thanks.
So great. You don't run into problem x or problem y.
But a LOT of people do. And when I sit down at somebody's computer, and they use Firefox, and they have more than a couple tabs open, it's slow. Inconceivably slow. Especially in light of how snappy Chrome manages to be with a big stack of tabs open.
And then on a modern computer, a nice shiny new computer, things are pausing erratically, and there's lag, and it's slow, and it feels like 2005.
I can hear you leaping to Firefox's defense now: "Sure, but that was only true until 5.323, when they fixed the 'FF is slow as shit' bug!" Or, "yes, but that has never happened to /me/, and I run Firefox on a Pentium I that I spilled a bunch of grape juice on and kick every day."
Congrats, you're either an anomaly, incredibly fortunate, or you limit your number of tabs, restart Firefox regularly, and clear out your history daily. All things that I can assure you, ordinary, non-technical people NEVER DO.
Chrome managed to make a browser that doesn't become unbearably slow under normal usage patterns. Firefox, for all its moral superiority (and I gladly concede that point), has never managed to do that.