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Comment by iamd3vil | Hacker News Reader

I know lot of people here say that Chrome is much faster than Firefox. I agree that sometimes chrome feels more responsive, but I want to tell my perspective from someone who owns a very old and slow laptop. Whenever I just start Chrome, it seems superfast until 5 minutes. Just open 5 tabs and some other programs like Terminal and Clementine, my whole system just hangs. So I can't even use Chrome because of the memory it consumes. Firefox actually seems very responsive for me even if I open 10-15 tabs, I can open other programs when it's open. Also I feel that in last two years I have rarely seen the UI hanging in Firefox when a page loads (even with my shitty laptop).

So I am really thankful for people who work on Firefox and letting me use it on a shitty laptop. Also it's one of the reasons I am learning Rust now so that I can contribute to it.

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I suspect the differences are more about browsing habits, because I have the opposite experience. I use both, and I never have to restart Chrome, but when my computer starts crawling and beach-balling, I know I can fix it by closing Firefox and re-loading the same set of tabs. I tend to open and close a lot more tabs on Firefox, and there are web sites I run exclusively in Firefox instead of in Chrome, so I'm not saying Firefox is any worse, just that if you stress it the right way, it has its own problems.

On a historical note, I remember that ten years ago Firefox's memory usage was a topic that generated a lot of heat online. I described my issues in detail once and got flamed by Firefox fanboys saying "you must be lying, because the memory leak was fixed two years ago," and those fanboys got flamed by a wave of truer fanboys saying "stop saying 'memory leak,' because it wasn't technically a memory leak, you're libeling the developers." I can't think of a piece of open source software that has such a rabid following these days, or maybe I'm just too old these days to hang out in such rough internet neighborhoods.

Well, using Google docs/sheets the difference is really big. I understand that Chrome should be heavily optimised to use other Google products like Google Sheets, but in the end, as a user it really makes a diference.

On a Macbook Pro from 2015, entering a simple Google Sheets documents and have the page fully loaded and ready to work takes me ~8 seconds on Chromium, but ~17 seconds on Firefox. It's really a huge diference.

Still, I'm trying to use Firefox more and more because of privacy considerations, but Mozilla really should up their game and have more focus in their roadmap.

I use Firefox as my primary browser. Do you have another example outside of google docs that behaves that way?

The difference for google docs on my machine (three year old Laptop) isn't as big as the one you describe and on ownclouds I don't actually see a difference. Obviously google targets Chrome with Docs. You could equally well say that Google needs to up their game there.

Where they really have catching up to do is with battery usage. Unfortunately Friefox Mobile simply uses up considerably more battery for me.

I do have another example: Marathon UI.

If you access the marathon UI in Firefox, your browser will eventually slow down to a crawl and the job JSON description will be rendered incorrectly (it seems like a memory leak somewhere).

It works fine on Chrome.

It might be worth reporting this on webcompat.com

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