[ftaghn]

>Firefox had the reputation of eating RAM like candy.

It wasn't unwarranted. They were dealing with a great deal of memory leak issues in the early Chrome vs FF era. The most important thing is that even when Chrome ended up taking more ram than FF for an equal amount of tab and equal websites loaded, closing tabs on Chrome was far more likely to let you free ram usage than on Firefox, and nobody likes to have to close the entire browser session to reclaim ram.

In the XUL days, Firefox was quite janky. XUL enabled powerful addons that made it a great power user browser, and people still occasionally can be seen missing it on places like HN, but it was also a curse upon the browser and they took too long to decide to get rid of it and rearchitect their browser into something more modern.

[junon]

Yes true, it was very much a warranted reputation, no doubt about that. I still use Firefox and am put off about its UX much in the same way as when chrome was released.

[acdha]

The other thing which was a problem were popular extensions which leaked memory. A lot of people went on this cycle where they’d install extensions until their browser was slow / unstable, switch to a different browser, say it was much faster, and then lard it up with extensions before repeating the process.