Every time I try to switch to Firefox, it just doesn't work as well, and I switch back. I'd rather Firefox over Chrome for philosophical reasons, but I feel like Firefox just isn't there technologically. It's getting better, but they really let it stagnate back in the day.
Can you elaborate on this? I've tried Chromium once and again, but always fall back to Firefox as it feels better to me. Direct reasons are the address bar functionality and better privacy support out of the box, but also some generic feel is somehow just more familiar to me.
Firefox does have global freezes on particularly heavy pages due to the single process model. It's rare enough not to bother me much though.
As a tip, the Firefox Android version allows add-ons -- uBlock most critically. It's just great.
While some progress is being made, it worries me that it's taking so long to get this functionality into the release versions. I'm not suggesting it should be rushed out, of course. But the Electrolysis efforts date back to 2009, if not earlier. That's a long time to make users wait!
Electrolysis breaks extensions that use low-level APIs designed in the single-process era [1]. This breakage drew the ire of a vocal minority of Firefox users enamored of such extensions, and AFAICT that's the major reason why e10s has taken such a long time to get enabled in release.
While the original Electrolysis work dates back to 2009, the project was put on hold for a couple years in the middle. Development resumed in mid-2013, as the archive of meeting notes shows:
I heard a nice description of Eletrolysis that at least partly explains why it has taken so long: it's the single largest change that has ever been made to Firefox.
Why does this concern you? Mozilla, isn't as cavalier as Google as far as releases are. I remember a time in chrome's beginning it was horribly unstable but patched often. It was the lure of constant quick updates that kept a lot of people eager for the "fixes".
I'm a hardcore Firefox user. Its been my browser of choice since it came out. I'm a true Mozillian to the heart. But it kills me that I can mostly keep one window open with less than 15 tabs on a Macbook that has 16GB of ram and a fast SSD. I currently have 9 tabs/1 window and its using up 3.13GB of memory. None of the tabs have heavy Javascript processes.
I had the same problem, and it was annoying as heck. Try running a multi-process build (Nightly/Aurora/Beta) and see if your experience gets any better.
For some reason the freezes are much worse in multi-process. Certain sites freeze it up consistently; newegg.com for example I just measured 67 seconds the whole window was completely unresponsive. If I disable e10s it runs fine.
I use chrome as the default browser on Windows at work and on Mac at home. Though i tried firefox before on both OS, i feel it's nothing compared to chrome. I feel it's very heavy, takes more time to load pages than chrome.
The same and also Chrome Sync is basically the most reliable piece of software I ever saw, specially when connected to the mobile Chrome. FF (or anyone else) doesn't do that.
firefox uses firefox sync (which predates chrome sync) to sync your bookmarks, passwords, addons, etc. it also syncs with firefox for android and firefox for iOS...
What does Chrome sync offer that Firefox sync lacks? FF syncs to the mobile version quite reliably for me (though, it does not sync to mobile Chrome if that is the feature that's lacking).
I've been syncing basically the same profile for 6 years now. FF lacked that at the beginning.
The Android FF app is also unusable since it doesn't support bookmark folders when using sync, which I don't even want to know what would do to my bookmarks across devices.
Firefox correctly syncs bookmark folders on both iOS and Android. Always has, as far as I can remember. What they doesn't support is putting your mobile bookmarks into folders on your mobile device; anything you bookmark on mobile lands in a "Mobile Bookmarks" folder. You have to either use tags or organize them using the desktop browser.
