Is it time to switch back to Firefox from Chrome? I remember when I originally switched around Firefox 3.5.x Chrome was much leaner and faster. Has the pendulum finally swung back the other way?
Firefox will never ask you to sign-in for the best browsing experience like chrome does. That's when I switched back. You can tell google is an ad company and users are secondary by their default choice of 3rd party cookies. I'd rather not have an ad company developing my browser. The incentives are all wrong.
I never saw a reason to switch to Chrome to begin with. Performance was acceptable for me, while other benefits always made Firefox more useful (privacy with encrypted Sync, better add-ons and etc.). And some time ago, Firefox clearly became a leader in performance as well.
All this "jumping to Chrome" was simply a hype thing IMHO, and I generally don't care about hype.
There was a period around FF14 where FF was performing terribly for me, and Chrome was acceptably fast as ever. That was what made me switch for a while.
For me, it is time. I switched back about a year ago, when Firefox started to not be painful any more, but still was a step back from Chrome. Some tabs would still cause stuttering in the whole app and sometimes scrolling was less than smooth.
These days however, I have not noticed any of these things for months in Firefox. Really I can't recommend it enough!
> For me, it is time. I switched back about a year ago, when Firefox started to not be painful any more, but still was a step back from Chrome.
What was the tipping point that prompted you to switch back to Firefox? Was Firefox able to import your Chrome history and bookmarks without losing anything?
I regularly compared browsing performance. I looked at how fast websites were loading and how fluidly they scrolled. Initially, I switched from FF to Chrome because it was so much faster. But then FF improved, while Chrome got worse and worse. So at some point, I switched back.
I never accrued much state in any browser. A handful of bookmarks is all I keep. All the rest is in several services that are independent of the browser. So I don't know about syncing, really. That said, I have since learned to love FF sync, which not only syncs bookmarks and plugins, but also the history and passwords. I even use it with Firefox Mobile on my Android.
The "many tabs" situation where Firefox performs better than Chrome is more like 50+ or 100+ tabs than 20. People have widely different use cases with tabs.
My experience is that performance on Chrome degrades beyond 30 or 40 tabs, though the exact value depends on your system.
You can have Firefox open with 400 tabs without too much performance degradation. Many tabs will be swapped to disk or not even loaded, but the tabs you actually use will work just fine.
(also, Firefox on Mac seems to perform less smoothly than on other platforms, though I'm not entirely sure why)
> The "many tabs" situation where Firefox performs better than Chrome is more like 50+ or 100+ tabs than 20.
For me it's much sooner... on my work machine with limited memory, firefox is almost always noticeably better after 3-4 tabs, or even fewer when they're memory-hungry sites like gmail. With only 1GB on that machine, I tend to be hyper-sensitive to memory usage, and unfortunately chrome tends to basically use up all memory on the system once I reach 8-9 tabs. FF gets a fair bit further.
The upside of chrome on that machine, however, is that the process-per-tab thing makes much easier to control memory usage: although tabs chew up memory quickly, closing a tab gives you back all the memory it was using, whereas with FF the relationship between closing tabs and giving memory back to the system is much fuzzier....
As Wilya says, 20 isn't much. A single branch of my tree-style tabs is saying that it has 25 child tabs; and I have ~30 top-level branches (admittedly about half of them are a single tab).
I am addicted to tabs and have 260 tabs (yes, I have a problem) open and running smoothly in Firefox. That was not possible in Chromium last time I used it.
Firefox currently uses about 3GB memory, which means I have plenty of memory left on my computer. So I do not think memory usage in the general case is so bad for Firefox and neither is scalability or performance. The problem Firefox historically has had and still to a degree has is lack of responsiveness.
20 represents an extreme slimming down for me. I usually run somewhere between 80 and 200 spread across a couple of windows, but can often go above. I installed a tab counter in FF just for fun. I'm not sure what site you have open in your one FF tab, but it must be a very specific one.
I've been using FF lately for cross browser testing. Until tabs run in their own process / thread I won't be switching back. Also, while the dev tools have come a long way and are pretty good now they're still not quite as good as Chrome.
I have 4 different Chromium profiles, and two different firefox profiles, with different levels of privacy / security. Each profile is also linked to a particular context, for example, a tab each for project A, project B, personal, etc.