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Comment by gjm11 | Hacker News Reader

Nowadays Firefox typically uses less memory than Chrome (though of course this depends on exactly what you measure and how). It's highly debatable which is faster -- this depends even more on how you measure -- but Chrome certainly isn't miles ahead. Chrome may have all the extensions you currently use, but Firefox still has a lot more; perhaps the next one you'd find useful will be Firefox-only.

None of which means that you actually should switch back: Chrome is a great web browser. But it isn't obvious that you shouldn't.

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If you use a lot of tabs and don't close your browser for long periods of time Chrome is vastly superior to Firefox (and all other browsers) in terms of memory use and stability.

Even if you don't use any add-ons at all. I've always taken issue with Firefox, it has the broadest support and community centered around add-ons - but if you actually use any add-on the browser becomes completely useless. I've been bitten so many times in the past that I barely trust any add-ons on any browser, eventhough I've only had issues with Firefox.

Hopefully it will be better now.

I have 396 tabs in FF right now. That would be impossible to handle for Chromium on my laptop. It starts heavily sweating at 25. Does Chrom(e|ium) do lazy loading of tabs these days? That'd be the main point that makes Firefox much more usable for many tabs to me.

I have over 1000 tabs open in Chrome. I would never be able to reach 500 tabs in firefox before giving up.

> If you use a lot of tabs and don't close your browser for long periods of time Chrome is vastly superior to Firefox (and all other browsers) in terms of memory use and stability.

That has been the opposite of my experiences, I am sitting on 100 tabs with 800MB of memory used in firefox. Sometimes I have 200+ with 1.5 GB of ram used.

Actually, just looking at chrome://memory-redirect/ in Chrome, it compares firefox's and chrome's memory usage. Chromium 1,394,260k 877,088k (about 40 tabs) Firefox 889,576k 62,692k (about 100 tabs).

Now this is on Linux, but I haven't used Firefox on windows recently to compare properly. One good explanation for all this is that the tab-per-process model means that you have a memory overhead for each process, so you naturally have more memory usage per tab.

> If you use a lot of tabs and don't close your browser for long periods of time Chrome is vastly superior to Firefox (and all other browsers) in terms of memory use and stability.

But not in terms of ui, tabs shrink till they hold no text in chrome instead of scrolling like in firefox.

I love the way chrome handles tabs, especially the way they shrink. The icon is enough to distinguish it and even if there is no icon for that page you already know its appromixmate position and can quickly find it (which you just can't when everything scrolls and you have no idea where you are).

The firefox tab scroll feature is probably the feature I hate the most, in any browser (yes, you can disable it - but bad defaults stink and you can't just go around and change the settings in everyones browser).

First time I've come across someone that doesn't hate it :o

The icon frequently isn't enough to distinguish tabs especially if you have a bunch of reddit/hacker news/wikipedia/google/tvtropes tabs open. Once it has shrunk to nothing there is little chance of knowing what any tab is except when going back and forth between a couple of tabs. Firefox also has a drop down list and lets you switch to a tab by entering a partial title/address in the address bar.

I remember Firefox used to have the bad behaviour like chrome(back in the 1.5 days) and I would occasionally use an IE shell called crazy browser to do my extremely many tab surfing(I also used 2 browsers partially so I could surf something else while 70+ political blogs or webcomics were loading since browsers tended to freeze for a long time on that back in those days).

I much prefer the Firefox tab scroll feature, compared to Chrome's way of handling tabs. The handy "show all tabs" dropdown is nice as well. Between the two, I find managing large numbers of tabs to be easier and less painful in FF than in Chrome.

YMMV.

I hated it too and then I installed the "Tree style tabs" add-on. It's great, they should add that functionality in the vanilla Firefox IMO.

Once the tabs get small chrome hides all the icons. It's awful. Whereas firefox can be configured to shrink tabs indefinitely and it never stops showing the icons.

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