[ewencp]

I honestly can't give hard numbers, but I really did switch back to FF because of the memory usage. My ancient-by-HN-standards but not-too-ancient-by-normal-standards desktop with 4GB RAM (Ubuntu 10.04 if that's relevant) was starting to thrash like crazy with a moderate number of tabs (maybe 6-12 on average), but most importantly, with a few open for long periods of time. Firefox seemed to really clean up their act wrt memory, where Chromium seemed to grow without bound and keep a lot of it in the working set, doubling the pain.

Firefox isn't perfect, but it seems to be more of a problem with Flash than the browser (clearing out my Rdio tab has the most effect). And measuring memory usage through top isn't perfect, but FF does seem to use significantly less RES even after long sessions.

So, anecdotal evidence, but I was using Chromium as my regular browser for years and ended up switching back to FF because I found the performance on my reasonable-but-aging machine to be far superior to Chromes under regular, long-term usage.

[ok_craig]

Makes sense. I wonder if Chrome is particularly bad on Linux? (My desktop runs Windows.)

[slacka]

I have a win7 laptop with 4GB of RAM. After using Chrome from the beginning, I also was forced to switch back to Firefox because recent builds of Chrome began thrashing with 10+ tabs open.

Firefox has it's issues. It still doesn't silently update when run under a normal user account. Also the UI freezes when running heavy HTML5 pages.

Chrome is beginning to feel like FF 3. Google needs to take a page from Mozilla and start their own MemShrink program.

[mnarayan01]

> Also the UI freezes when running heavy HTML5 pages.

Any examples? I've never seen this (other than blatantly broken JS), and would be interested in seeing what would cause it.

[slacka]

My trading platform, tradeking.com, has a web app called Live Trading. According to the task manager, it maxes out 1 of my cores, and makes Firefox's UI unusable in both my home and work computers. My solution has been to run that app in Chrome, and do my light duty browsing in FF. Chrome's CPU usage is also high, but the UI stays responsive.

[mnarayan01]

Heh...it would be something I can't go to. It sounds more like inefficient JS than any HTML5 issues, but that is one drawback to not separating tabs; if the JS on one is maxing a core, you can't do anything anywhere else.

[khill]

I use Ubuntu for both work and home use. Chrome is the only browser I use and I never have any problems with it.

I don't use sites like gmail or google docs, though, so maybe it has more to do with the sites visited than the OS platform.

[ewencp]

Not in my experience -- I have the same issues on my MBP, though I use it maybe 1/10th the time, so I'm less certain of that impression.

[beaner]

Yeah, that's suspicious. On my Macbook Air, which is noticeably weaker, I don't experience any of that with Chrome.

[ewencp]

Should probably qualify: MBP from 3-4 years ago... But I don't expect it should suck this bad this quickly....

[AUmrysh]

It is, I've had nothing but issues with it on Linux, including problems where it would lock up the entire computer. There's no choice for me on Linux but FireFox, even though I prefer Chrome on Windows.