[bad_user]

Chrome is very wasteful; only after many hours of operation in which you opened and closed dozens and dozens of tabs, it starts to be better than Firefox; as Firefox fragments memory and doesn't release it properly when closing a tab.

But for my usage patterns; with many tabs opened after a few hours of operation, Firefox consumes less RAM for me.

Also, don't confuse memory waist (coming from bloat and fragmentation) with memory used for improving the browsing experience, like caching. These browsers are doing a lot of caching and I personally don't like having 4 GB of memory and being left unused.

[catshirt]

memory footprint or not, chrome is faster than firefox. both in terms of page loading, and raw operation. i might reconsider firefox when it doesn't take 4 times longer to boot up.

[bad_user]

I am on Firefox 5 and I don't see visible differences between them anymore. Yes, Firefox 3.x used to be visibly slower.

I also don't see visible differences in boot time, but this depends a lot on how many extensions you have -- I only use Firebug and the Web Developer toolbar. And at least Firefox has plugins that aren't totally useless.

[daed]

I think it depends on what hardware you're running. On my laptop Chrome is so noticeably better I only keep Firefox around for testing. On my maxed out desktop I can't tell the difference.

[catshirt]

firefox 4 is visibly slower on a completely fresh install on my mbp. you may have a point about firefox 5, i haven't tried it. my firefox and chrome reference has only been the past to 2 years of major releases.

[sixtofour]

Starting up a browser is a relatively rare even, for me at least. The only time I restart Firefox is when it's consumed or leaked too much memory, about once a day.