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by cyphax 4695 days ago
I could've written this myself. I love Firefox and I used it for years but at some point it became rather unusable and after it forgot which tabs I had pinned as app tabs for the fifth or so time (because I had to kill a completely unresponsive Firefox, this happened often) I was angry enough to actually give Chrome a try. It is SO much more responsive, even just the UI. I've kept Firefox up-to-date but I don't want to keep switching back and forth so I haven't made a switch back. I hope I'll get to, though.

This is all on a Windows 7 machine though, rather than OSX.
1 comments
slacka 4695 days ago
Firefox has come so far from the memory hogging 4.0 days. Like others here, I give it a shot ever few month and UI responsiveness always sends me back to Chrome. The resurrected electrolysis project can’t come soon enough.

The irony is what use to be its greatest flaw, memory usage/leaks, is now it's greatest strength. Around Chrome 15+ memory usage started ballooning and was too much for my 2GB netbook. A laggy UI is much better than an unresponsive system from thrashing RAM.

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cyphax 4695 days ago
Yeah, I don't mind big memory usage per se. I have tons of RAM, 8GB in fact. Take 1 if you need it, if it results in a responsive application. Chrome uses something like that right now. But if I hit ctrl-t on Chrome, I INSTANTLY get a new tab. Firefox lacks that. You see Firefox moan and sweat for a few seconds, and then poop out that new tab you ordered. But that's not the worst thing: the worst thing is that it would occasionally (say once every 2 weeks) crash and upon restart completely have forgotten what tabs I had open and that is a pet peeve of mine. I want it to be more reliable.
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brymaster 4692 days ago
> crash and upon restart completely have forgotten what tabs I had open

I've run into some strange behavior like this before too. When you reopen Firefox and its lost your session, try opening another window or two and see if 'Restore Previous Session' is finally available.

If that didn't work, there are also a few other tools that can help solve restoring your sessionstore.js:

Firefox Sessionstore.js fixer

http://thepanz.netsons.org/post/firefox-sessionstore-js-fixe...

What if Firefox loses your tabs ?

http://dag.wieers.com/blog/what-if-firefox-loses-your-tabs

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agumonkey 4695 days ago
On Nightly it's even better, it's aggressively compacting memory, it was running around 30% (2GB total) instead of 40+ a few weeks ago. Kudos for their effort. I wish they could replicate a tiny bit of it toward the GUI.
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blueveek 4695 days ago
If you don't know already, a huge UI overhaul is planned to land sometimes between Firefox 25 or 26 [0]. As far as I know, better performance is a big reason for the change as well.

[0] https://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/ux-presentation/ux-pr...

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agumonkey 4695 days ago
I didn't know they were trying to fix performance too. To me this was only a UX redesign. Which I tried not long ago, and I was disappointed, it doesn't add much actually. A few theme changes here and there, a nice configurable menu that personally I'll never use. I'm not sure what to think about it ... we'll see.
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