[btipling]

Mozilla's "phoenix" legacy is alive and well. I have been very skeptical of Mozilla even very recently as Firefox's many performance problems seemed insurmountable. But here I am after many years of using Chrome typing in this box using Firefox. I also hope they don't change direction. They're on fire and rising once again.

[bmj]

Agreed. I've noticed some rather nice performance improvements over the last six months, and, like you, I've switched back to FF from Chrome.

[hollerith]

I'm guessing the computer you're running FF on has a solid-state drive; amiright ?

added: my reason for asking is that I run FF (release update channel) and I genuinely wonder whether it would be more responsive if it weren't for my slow hard drive. (in particular, I am hypothesizing that every time I visit a new page, its URL gets committed to disk.) was not trying to slam FF; please don't downvote me!

[bmj]

No, I'm not, actually. Just your standard, Dell-issued laptop drive.

I noticed better memory usage and general performance increases within the last few releases to the beta channel (sorry, I can't pinpoint which one it was). I started to use FF again a few months ago, and found I still needed to restart the browser at least once a day to keep things responsive (and I don't usually have more than a dozen tabs open). Then, after one of the updates, I didn't need to do that, and I didn't notice any performance degradation over the course of several days.

[hollerith]

Thanks. I'll try the beta channel.

[btipling]

It's more than performance, they've also picked up must have features like opening up just closed tabs (cmd+shift+t), and cmd+9 to go to last tab, private windows (used to be all of firefox went private), quick updates.

[mirzmaster]

Reopening a closed tab via Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+T has been a longtime feature of Firefox, since at least early 2007.

[btipling]

Oh, whoops. Thanks for correcting me!

[hollerith]

The "Recently Closed Tabs" menu item (under "History") has been in FF since version 11 or before.

[hollerith]

A few hours after I wrote this, my FF updated itself (to version 20.0) and became much, much more responsive!

[jimmaswell]

Tr changing some disk-related settings in about:config.