Over the weekend, the crew at Tom’s Hardware was busy testing the recently-released Firefox 22 using the usual bevy of benchmarks. This roundup included Chrome 27, Firefox 22, IE10, and Opera 12, along with the new Chromium-based build of Opera Next (alos known as Opera 15).
For the first time, Firefox 22 pulls off a truly decisive win against Google’s browser. Chrome, once known for starting up instantly, has become the slowest browser to launch, allowing Firefox 22’s lightning-fast startup times to create a wide spread between these two otherwise equally-matched browsers. Chrome’s historically poor ability to properly render many pages at once also became a problem for the world’s new favorite web browser, as Firefox 22 sees the return of rock solid reliable page renders. Google’s minor edge over Mozilla in other metrics just isn’t nearly enough for Chrome to fend off the fox.
As most would expect, Opera Next performs essentially like Diet Chrome, with superior WebGL performance being the only area where the new Opera stands above Chrome.
Note from Thom: I plan on trying out Firefox after its recent number of performance improvements. Chrome has been having some minor issues for me lately, and I want to keep an open mind to possible competing products. Perhaps Blink will enable Chrome to edge ahead in the future once more, but I want the fastest browser now, not four months from now.
Have any of you been switching browsers lately? If so, from which to which? Any troubles you ran into?
It might be faster in benchmarks, but the user interface is more clunky and prone to locking up, whereas I have never seen this behaviour in chrome.
Edited 2013-07-03 11:11 UTC
They (Firefox) worked and work on that. Try latest release.
http://dutherenverseauborddelatable.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/announ…
More at https://blog.mozilla.org/vdjeric/category/planet-mozilla/
Edited 2013-07-03 11:42 UTC
I am running nightly at home and latest here. Nothing has changed.
Something is seriously wrong with either your hardware or your Firefox profile.
I am running a 8 CPU Xeon box at work with 16GB of ram, which has uptimes of weeks. Nothing is wrong, Firefox just shits itself.
I work with 5 other developers and we all experience the same behaviour. Chrome doesn’t display the same behaviour.
Also this excuse of “your profile is corrupted” you know I don’t care it is corrupted or how it happened. No other software on my system does this, except for Firefox, the devs need to find out why it happens and fix it.
People keep up making excuses for why Firefox does weird things instead of getting this stuff fixed.
Edited 2013-07-04 08:58 UTC
No problems like you describe here. You are either using a bad plugin, or your profile is f^A¨cked up.
Well, I guess my profile and all of my coworkers’ profiles are fucked up. I’d like to know how to unfuck it … Or something like that, because if it works for you, there couldn’t possibly be any problem with Firefox …
Firefox is still locking up in the newest release and I don’t believe they can do a lot in this regard without making the application run in multiple threads. Cooperative multitasking will always be problematic …
Well, at least you’ll find out as Mozilla continue their efforts to do just that.
Don’t let others get to you with this profile stuff, though. Just try a fresh profile, and if it doesn’t help, you’ll know it’s the particular hardware you have, sites you visit (etc).
And if it does help, then that just means there’s something wrong with your profiles and you’ll have to hope Mozilla can debug it with you or find a way to reset/restart. I had to do it, and it wasn’t nearly as painful as I thought, but that was just me.
…or, it’s Firefox. Are you kidding me? My primary PC is a ~$4,000 build with dual Xeons which are <1 year old (24 cores total), 48gb memory, two RAID1’d SSD’s, ATI fancy something video card, and I only use Firefox lightly for web development (where it shines) so you can’t blame my “profile”.
It’s unusably slow compared to Chrome. Granted, I’m a responsiveness snob, but I’m not that much in the minority with that.
Yes, yes. Sorry that I didn’t include that. I was assuming that Firefox started acting badly, not that it was a general problem from day one.
It’s just always possible that you’re just using addons that suck, so checking a new profile is a quick way to check. No need to get that upset.
And hey, if it makes you feel even angrier, I have PCs that suck with Chrome and not Firefox. Perhaps I ought to be angry at Chrome?
Edited 2013-07-07 05:15 UTC
Maybe I missed something (and please forgive me if I did) but you’re running nightly, it’s unstable and you… complain?
I’m running FF on a large number of machines ranging from Nexus 7 up to a heavily loaded dual Xeon workstation and I can’t say that I share your experience.
Though, all the machines are running Fedora Linux (minus the Nexus 7) w/ the nVidia binary driver.
– Gilboa
Edited 2013-07-04 21:19 UTC
I’m running a quad core i5 with 8GB here and I’m not having any serious issues with either browser under Windows 7. Though, both are prone to slowdowns with a bunch of tabs open, and occasionally Firefox does lock up on me, but usually only if my computer is already doing something crazy and other apps lock up too. I’m on the release channel for both browsers, so perhaps your issues may be related to being on the dev or beta channel?
On GNU/Linux (Crunchbang to be specific) Firefox (Iceweasel) is rock solid and fast, though I’m on version 20.0. Chromium is fast and stable too, but I’m having plugin issues with it so I’m sticking with Iceweasel for now.
developers – you are probably using Firebug. That thing kills Firefox dead. The built in tools aren’t good enough just yet to replace Firebug (they are getting closer though), but the way Firebug just kills Firefox, I’ve not been installing it anymore. It gets worse with each release. Firefox is much livelier without it.
I’d actually suggest Tom’s should rerun all the FireFox benchmarks with Firebug installed, if anyone cared.
To be fair, I’ve found that Firebug generally doesn’t cause problems unless it happens to be active in the given tab you’re on (or you’re switching between such tabs).
That said, I’m with you. I only use it on a development profile now, since with –no-remote I can run two Firefoxes easily enough anyway.
I really hope that Firebug devs can finally move it to JSD2 and such more quickly, because it’s clearly in dire need of some update love.
It might be because I used it on an old slow mac mini, but I used to see Firebug pop up in between pages (like going from Google to some random results link) all the time, even though it wasn’t active on either page. I think it shows up in more scenarios than it should, and that kills performance. Firefox is fast without it (although, Flash has recently been stalling Firefox, especially in version 21, things got better in 22).
Why do you keep blaming Firefox’s problems on the user’s profiles? Ever think that Firefox is not perfect, and that it is actually not free of bugs and performance problems?
I just updated from version 21 to 22 and now I’m starting to see brief lock-ups in the Firefox GUI in my (so far) brief time with it. Yay. What do you suggest? Delete my profile and create another? At that rate I might as well just switch to Chrome or Chromium and give it a try, because it won’t be worth it getting all my settings back to the way I have had them for years. If I’m going to start fresh, I might as well consider the competition.
Then again, I might just consider Seamonkey. For some reason I keep forgetting about it these days, although it’s traditionally been a good browser and in my experience has always… *gasp* tended to feel even more lightweight than Firefox, in terms of speed and responsiveness. Ironic, considering one of Firefox’s core missions at the beginning was to fight bloat from the original Netscape/Mozilla suite.
Well… I guess on the bright side it appears that the latest version takes up just slightly less memory. Not much, it’s still a hog, but slightly.
Edited 2013-07-05 09:09 UTC
I suggest trying a profile reset first, because that’s usually far less painful for users than restarting entirely. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix-most-p…
Historically, user profiles are an occasional problem in any app. The onus isn’t just on the app developer, though. Sadly, it’s the price we pay for being able to customize the thing so much. Mozilla do work rather hard on making sure profiles will continue working, but sometimes issues do crop up.
That doesn’t sound too much different than just ditching my current profile and creating a new one, to be honest. What exactly could I expect to lose in the process of doing that as far as my settings go? At this point I’m seriously considering just backing up my bookmarks, and starting completely fresh. And if that doesn’t work… hello SeaMonkey or Chrome/Chromium. Can’t try the new Opera, because it’s not available on Linux yet (as usual…).
I’m really getting tired of playing these stupid games with Mozilla. It’s getting ridiculous.
By the way–too late to edit my previous post–anyone know if there’s a way to find out when a Firefox profile was created? I’m just curious how old mine actually is before I do anything…
Edited 2013-07-06 03:23 UTC
I don’t know of any way more reliable than searching for the oldest file in your profile, but I suppose that might at least give you some ballpark estimate.
Yeah… unfortunately 2012 was the oldest I could find. I though maybe it would be recorded in some text file or something. I know it’s older than that.
The link goes into detail on what you’d lose and what’s saved, but for most users the big bite will be having to reinstall add-ons, reopen your windows/tabs (login/cookie info/history are kept intact though) and re-add more advanced things like custom search engines, mime settings, and custom toolbars/user styles.
I’d personally just try a new profile first, since that won’t touch your old one (close Firefox entirely, run it with -p, create a new profile, and try browsing with your usual session for a while to see if it’s better). https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remo…
If that worked, then it’s worth trying a profile reset since it’s far less intense than a completely new profile (you can delete the test one easily enough). I’d only start from scratch if the new profile worked, but resetting your current one didn’t. Of course I always advocate backing up your profile before tinkering with it to reset it/etc.
I think I will just do that and hope it works well. Meanwhile I will back up my current profile, and possibly move it back over if there are problems. Thanks for the suggestions. I am not anticipating the “Firefoxication” or “De-Chromification” of my settings though… it it gets to be too much of a pain in the ass, I might have to give Firefox a goodbye.
Sure, and sometimes changing is a good way of shaking up old habits and finding a more efficient workflow (esp. if you use a lot of Google services then Chrome might be better for you, for instance).
Just don’t be too stubborn about it (like some of my colleagues). Firefox isn’t going away, so if you’re TOO used to doing things in Firefox-land, you might be better off taking this kind of hit like I did a year or two ago.
Besides, there’s no rule that says you have to use only one browser, or that you can’t take this opportunity to try a bunch of them out for a week, and find one that’s better for your needs (Seamonkey might be a good option, but then so might Maxthon or Lunascape, depending on your tastes/needs).
Do you believe Chrome would be more perfect than Firefox? That hasn’t been my experience. This article would seem to back that up.
I have noticed that too and it has GOT to be the Gecko engine, because both IceDragon and Pale Moon do similar “senior moments” as I call them.
But for me it could be the fastest browser on the planet but until it supports low rights mode its just too risky for my customers. there are plenty of bugs like the “Yahoo Porn Bug” which will not work in any other browser, not even IE, that work in FF for me to give it to my customers.
Speed is fine but not when its at the cost of security and having the browser run at the same rights as the user is just dumb,especially when we are talking about a security feature that first came out in windows Vista which is about to become 4 releases ago. It would also probably be trivial to adapt low rights mode to work with AppArmor and SELinux so there really is no excuse not having such a useful security feature.
I have found a good 90% of the infections come from the browser so by having the browser run in lower rights drops infections right off the scale. No way I’m gonna risk my customers for a little speed,no way.
So this feature only works on vista/win7/win8 with IE? It does not work on linux, winxp, macos, android? And it does not work with Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari?
All those users must be nuts using the web on those machines!
Nice straw man, shame if this match were to get too close…whoosh!
Nice attempt at trying to spread FUD but you fail when it comes to browser knowledge, since Chrome as well as any based on it or based on IE ALREADY HAVE low rights mode, in fact the Chromium team added support less than 6 months after the release of Vista.
As for Linux I’m sorry but a simplistic R/W/E schema doesn’t cut it, hence why AppArmor and SELinux were created which again it should be trivial to adopt the same mechanism so that Linux could enjoy a low rights browser in SELinux and AppArmor so its really no excuse.
But if you want to claim FF is only usable on Linux fine, do that, but good security practices are good practices and bad is bad, and having the browser run at the same rights as the user is not only bad security practice its just plain stupid. Remove the browser as a vector and malware drops right off the chart, as I have found thanks to low rights mode, but if you want to support bad security practices that is your choice, just as its mine to warn people who may not know all browsers are NOT created equal.
But FYI I haven’t used IE in over a decade and I don’t recommend IE to my customers, but its kind of sad when even IE has better security practices than FF which is the case now. Use Chrome,Chromium, Comodo Dragon,SWIron, plenty to choose from that won’t make you sacrifice security just to surf the web.
I have no idea where I strawman you.
Is that feature really that important? If it is is Mozilla just really really dumb or just incompetent?
Years ago when it was introduced in Vista there was talk about it at Mozilla. Their security people thought it was more a gimmick.
I am no security researcher but I trust Mozilla over MS.
Your straw man was saying that it was “IE or Mozilla” like they were the only choices, and again you try to make an “US VS Them” argument which again holds ZERO water.
Don’t like Chrome? Great, you have MANY choices that also have low rights mode and don’t call home. I personally use Comodo Dragon, it gives the user Privdog right off the bat (but can be disabled if you don’t want it) and the only “phone home” it has is an update checker. You can choose to use their free DNS service which is great at blocking phishing sites but unlike Chrome its a checkbox at install or a simple checkbox in options so you can flip it on and off whenever you like. Don’t like dragon either? SWIron, Chromium, heck even QTWeb supports low rights mode IIRC and its not only FOSS its cross platform as well.
At the end of the day all you are doing is making excuses and everybody knows that excuses are just like a certain orifice in that everybody has one and they all stink. Good security practices are good, bad security practices are bad, and for whatever reason Moz has decided to stick with the latter. If that serious risk is something you are willing to put up with? Fine that is your choice, just as its mine to warn people they are taking risks with their systems that they don’t have to.
You strawman me by changing my argument until it sounds ridiculous. I didn’t know Chrome had that feature which is why I stated it as a question. So 2 browsers that support it on windows. The many skins of chrome like Comodo, Opera etc. count as one just as the many skins of IE count as one.
I have asked questions and instead of answering you wave them away as if smart people should just now that you are right. You did not address a single argument I made.
A lot of statements and no arguments or anything that could convince someone like me.
What questions? You made an “us versus them” strawman, and i pointed out a half a dozen choices, NONE of them running the IE trident engine (if I would have included those that use trident i could have upped the list to a dozen) and the only “question” you supposedly asked was, and I quote “So this feature only works on vista/win7/win8 with IE?”
So if you want your one highly rigged “question” answered i have already answered it, NO it doesn’t only work in IE, pretty much any chromium or webkit based also supports this feature and NO it doesn’t work only in windows, it would be trivial to add support in AppArmor or SELinux.
The default Linux security model of a simplistic (designed in the early 70s BTW, Linus got it from early Unix) model based on R/W/E is too primitive and coarse to be useful, but that is of course why AppArmor and SELinux were made, to give the MUCH better NTFS style ACLs (designed by Dave Cutler originally for VMS and he brought them to Windows when he designed NTFS) so that Linux could have fine grained security with permission levels.
So if you want to keep making straw men go right ahead but you can try to spin it all you want but in the end you can’t change the facts, which are that good security practices are good, bad practices are bad, and that running the browser in the same permissions as the user is just dumb and that is EXACTLY what Firefox does and there is nothing you can say that will change that, nor will it change that there are browsers out there that don’t make such a stupid mistake.
Next you’ll be telling me to not use Chrome because it uses the same NSS/NSPR networking library that Mozilla created. Take a look at cvedetails before trying to tell me that Chrome is safer.
I like Firefox’s user interface, I dunno what it is, but I prefer it.
But I don’t use it for development other than doing CSS anymore since Chrome’s tools are far better.
IE9 and 10 IMHO are more than good enough for most people. I’ve also got well past the stage of evangelising a better browser … if people have problems they will ask or find a better solution.
Having slightly better performance is great and all but I think there are so many little problems with Firefox these days it is a dubious honour (and for the person who wants to know what these are they are so numerous and odd that I could not possible list them all).
A combination of Firebug, Chrome, and other dev tools is really the way to go. There are things each can do the others cannot, and even the native Firefox tools have some nice features you shouldn’t overlook even if you reach for one over the others by default.
Sorry the new native tools are awful.
Chrome dev tools are more stable quite frankyly and are easier to use.
But does Chrome have a 3D DOM viewer yet? What about a responsive design view? What about showing you the paints that are taking place as you play with the page?
Again, each browser has its own developer niceties in certain respects, and you should become familiar with them for the (probably rare) cases they’re useful.
As a web dev, I have no idea why anyone would need it. It too much and tbh pretty much everyone in the office think it is a nice gimmick, nothing more.
God if you can’t visual a DOM tree in your head, you’ve got bigger problems.
Half the time if you write the page properly you don’t need half of this stuff.
Also testing on devices is the only way to sanely test whether you layout works successfully.
I am familiar with them and Chrome is far more predictable and stable with regards to it’s dev tools.
I don’t have the JS breakpoints suddenly just stop work (aka Firebug), I don’t have random times when the CSS doesn’t load on the page.
There is a reason why people and devs have flocked to chrome. It is simply better.
Wow, seriously? I thought you were trying to have a useful discussion here, not start some sad, random e-peen measuring contest. I wasn’t even suggesting Chrome was worse or Firefox was better. I was just saying it’s nice to know your available tools, even if you’re such a hotshot that you’ll never need them. Enjoy your browser and your smug sense of superiority.
I am sorry I don’t think flashy 3D inspector tools straight that looks like it is a product of CSI Miami UI designers school.
Keep on trollin’
Apparently Trolling is having a strong opinion about something on this site.
Piss off.
If you wanted to have a debate or discussion we could have one. But you don’t. You just want to smugly assert that your subjective opinions are objectively superior, while suggesting that people who use features you dislike must be objectively inferior web developers. You piss off.
As long as that lets you sleep at night.
Look mate, I didn’t think a lot of those features were of use to me which has been doing this stuff for quite some time now.
Now you might get mad at me by dismissing this as crap … but TBH web developers have dug their own grave a long time ago. We’ve had tools since forever to validate our markup, to check out JavaScript and tbh it hasn’t been enforced.
So you think these nice little tools will change a culture of slacking it as long as it work in browser X?
You can call me all sorts of names but it not going to change those facts.
Yeah, yeah. Look, with that perspective, ALL of these tools are useless. So why even bring it up?
I wouldn’t even have called you out had you stopped at “I disagree that the tools are very useful, and still think that Chrome is superior.”
But you took it further, and then got upset when I called you out for it. Thanks, but no thanks.
f–k off mate, stop mus-understanding passion for being rude. If you can’t stand being spoken to like an adult, grow a pair.
I just don’t think there are benefits beyond quality tools that Google has given me with Chrome.
If you don’t want to believe this, that is fine.
I honestly don’t think those features (that you mentioned) are of huge benefit for cross browser applications.
Plus the inspector tool in Firefox (not the Firebug one) was made by f–king evil c*nts that hate web developers.
Edited 2013-07-08 20:30 UTC
Enough. If you want to be a borderline jerk and hide behind “passion” as an excuse, so be it. I understand your opinion. I’ll just hope you can learn to speak it without being such a short-fused dick next time.
No not enough.
If passion doesn’t drive you you might as well be a little troll.
You make nasty insults but at the end of the day my critique of the dev tools stands tall.
Why don’t you wank yourself off to how righteous you feel?
Edited 2013-07-08 22:10 UTC
Congrats, and thanks for proving my point. You can have your precious victory.
I think the UI is fine, although if we were judging strictly based on UI I would lean towards Pale Moon and IceDragon as they are much less likely to suddenly change, but its the “senior moments” I’ve found that drive people up the wall when it comes to gecko based browsers.
For those that don’t know a “senior moment” is when an OS or program will “hang” or come unresponsive for a few seconds, not enough to call the program hung and attempt a hard shutdown, just long enough to interrupt the workflow and be REALLY annoying. For a good example of this try Vista RTM on a P4 with HT and Speedstep, or firefox now,especially if you have a lot of bookmarks or tabs going.
But I agree there are too many niggling problems with FF for speed to be the primary concern and in fact I’ve found on the average home connection browser speed is probably the least likely bottleneck, more often its the ISP DNS, line congestion, or bandwidth limitations that will bottleneck the system before the browser does. worrying about browser speed today is like putting a monster GPU into a system that is still running a 4200 RPM hard drive, all that speed isn’t gonna fix the other bottlenecks.
If we’re talking anecdotes I’ve noticed this behavior in both Firefox and Chrome at times, but one of the big notes about Firefox performance in this review was that they’ve fixed a lot of their UI freezes to the point where it feels noticeably snappier.
I have to admit that nightly is a lot better than the stable version I use at work.
I think their mobile browser BTW is f–king amazing. So maybe their focus is there these days … who knows.
Edited 2013-07-04 19:40 UTC
This makes me very happy.
But the changes they’ve made to the beta version of their mobile browser make me very sad. The location bar now stays at the top of the page, disappearing when you scroll down. So to access the tab switching button you have to go all the way back to the to of the page. So frustrating.
If you scroll up near the top of the screen, the location bar reappears immediately.
Ah, and so it does. That’s not so bad.
But it still means three steps to switch tabs instead of two. I’ll probably wait to upgrade the non-beta version until there’s an add-on to disable that. Literally my two favorite things about ff mobile are that there’s a working add-on that makes “Request Desktop Site” the default, and that the title-bar stays put.
For some of us, it was a welcome change. Some people use devices with limited screen real estate, and so hiding the location bar gives back precious pixels to browse with.
Hopefully they will figure out a way to show the location bar in a simple and intuitive manner. Or just keep the current behaviour, and have some UI change indicate to the user the easy way to bring the location bar back.
If you are wanting to stick with the Gecko engine but don’t like the way FF does things maybe you should try one of the variants? There are plenty you know, for my customers that prefer gecko or have some extension they want to keep I give them Comodo IceDragon, while like Moz it doesn’t have low rights mode its secure DNS does up the security.
Then there is Pale Moon which is an optimized build for Windows with both an X86 and X64 build so you can squeeze every drop of performance, there is Waterfox, heck if you don’t mind being a little behind the curve but have an older system there is Kmeleon and Kmeleon CCF ME, those are probably 2 of the lightest browsers out there and in the case of CCF ME it can just be dropped on a thumbstick and with a couple of .DLLs will even run just fine on a system as old as Win98.
This is one thing I try to stress that so few seem to grasp, one of the truly great things that has come from the ending of IE dominance is how many great choices we have when it comes to browsers. With just the Gecko and Webkit variants we have easily a dozen to choose from, each with its pluses and minuses, so it really becomes more about finding a browser that fits YOUR style and YOUR way of doing things instead of the “my way or the highway” attitude of old.
Heck there are plenty that are going their own way still out there, for those that like or need cross platform they should check out QTWeb which is just what it says on the tin, a UI created in QT and the Webkit engine, comes with Adblock Plus, can run from a thumbstick and works on pretty much any X86 system out there. We have a LOT of choices in this area so you really shouldn’t settle, try a few and find which fits your style of doing things.
I use the Three Finger Swipe add on for that, switch, close and open new tabs with single gestures:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/android/addon/three-finger-swipe/
Been using Firefox for years. I try Chrome every once in a while but I have become comfortable with Firefox and always switch back. Never had the issues others have complained about with the Fox. I have noticed the speed increase. All my critical plugins still work. All win!
My browser experience suffers from me only having a 2gig laptop. Almost every day I reach a point where I have to restart the browser because it slows down. Chrome, Firefox, whatever.
Already I’m a few hours into my daily routine and Firefox is at 600mb. I try to make use of tab groups in Firefox to limit this, and it helps a bit.
I also suspect Gmail, Youtube of scripts that slow the browser down.
All I can say is the browser is now the heaviest application on my desktop and has been for some time. It’s the price we have to pay for access to “the cloud” and fast/responsive interaction with the web; but it sucks that my browser experience is now outgrowing my 2gig laptop.
I know it is not a fix but I recommend using the mobile versions of the sites:
touch.facebook.com
m.gmail.com
And so on and so forth.
Sounds like you have a dirty profile to me, or a misbehaving extension. If you want to rule out the profile, back up your stuff (bookmarks etc.), wipe Firefox from your hard disk (including manually deleting all Mozilla folders – don’t forget AppData!) and reinstall the browser. If this still doesn’t fix it, then a misbehaving extension is to blame.
The thing is that I know it is an extension, and tbh I don’t really think this should happen.
I know it isn’t firebug, it’s probably colorzilla but I need it semi-regularly.
The mobile version of Firefox I think it pretty awesome tbh, it does run noticeably faster than Chrome on my Samsung S3 mini.
I’m surprised to hear Chrome’s cold-start is slowest now. Start speed was the main reason I switched from Firefox to Chrome early on. Nowadays, on a newer computer with more RAM, it’s not as noticeable. I should test this on my old computer sometime.
Since my SSDs failed (and I really can’t be bothered to replace them at the moment), everytime I start Firefox I find it takes longer than Chrome ….
However on my home machine I am running nightly of Firefox and Chrome Canary.
The thing that I am really excited by which nobody mentions is WebRTC support which IMHO is bloody awesome after playing around with it.
On Linux and normal HDDs I’ve found that Chrome (Canary and latest stable) take FOREVER to load.. well over 10 seconds. And that’s with pretty much a new user profile!
Firefox hasn’t had that problem since around version 3 or so, and it loads up in under 5 seconds depending on the number of tabs and extensions I have open.
So really, this is very much anecdotal and dependent on many factors. To the point where it might even be a useless statistic for all but the most basic users.
Dependant on many factors. At work we all have the same model of machine with the same OS, same AV … you get the picture.
Firefox is always far slower than Chrome.
Never liked Chromium that much, but despite this, the killer feature of Firefox does not come from Mozilla at all.
And yes, I know there are alternatives for Chromium, but they are not comparable to Vimperator.
Agreed, although I use pentadactyl instead.
None of the webkit browsers can match firefox for features with that.
I hadn’t heard about pentadactyl. It appears that its the new version of vimperator. I’d love to try it, but firefox says its not version 22 compatible ….
It is compatible; I’m using the nightly build of it with 22.
I typically don’t like installing updates through anything other than mozilla’s website. Any reason why they have limited that version to 14? Vimperator is not similarly limited.
There was an update to firefox with 15 which totally broke the add-on, and they are not satisfied that the changes made since deserve a new release.
I’ve never understood that reasoning before, although it seems quite popular. An obvious bug prevents the current version from working with modern software, but there aren’t enough “new features” to release an update that would fix the bug. Stuff happens, just release the fix on the official channel.
I have used Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, Epiphany, Midori, Opera and Internet Explorer. Out of them all my favorite is Firefox, because it has so many handy add-ons and is truly a non-profit community-driven project (that has become a “killer feature” since the beginning of the surveillance drama). Chrome/Chromium is a nice browser too, especially if you are using Google’s services, as there are small nice things, like text formatting keyboard shortcuts, that work flawlesly.
I’m a loyal Firefox user, but the latest couple of versions have broken my use of Citrix/Xen (.ica files are downloaded in stead of executed, and repeated re-installs of different versions of the citrix clients haven’t done anything to change this).
Since reinstalling citrix doesn’t help, and since IE10 has no trouble executing the .ica files and starting the actual citrix connections, I can’t help but feel that Firefox broke something along the way, giving me no option but to use IE10 for those jobs which require citrix connections.
Edit > Preferences > Applications
Have you tried setting it there?
Hello there, I’m a long time lurker first time poster…
Citrix Client Plug-in Issues – Been there, fixed that.
All you have to do is copy the “\Mozilla Firefox\Plugins” folder to the “\Mozilla Firefox\Browser” folder. So you will end up with a Mozilla Firefox\Browser\Plugins folder.
Then about:plugins in the location bar should show Citrix ICA Client plugin again.
They moved the location of the Plugins folder without telling everybody.
Thanks!
I’m going to exclusively use Opera 15 for a week and see if it behaves well. I didn’t use Opera for years due to poor rendering speed and lack of extensions. But now, that it uses Blink rendering engine and it already has lots of useful extensions, it might be a good browser for me.
The reason to switch to Opera 15 is that I’m getting fed with Chrome and Google logging my online activities. i’m also trying startpage.com which is basically google search engine with privacy and anonimity added, so no IP logging and tracking.
I installed Opera before reading this article and finding out about Tom Hardware’s test but I’m glad that at page loading speed Opera 15 is the first along with Chrome.
At least the result page shows where Opera 12 really stands : behind IE 10, at the last position, for every score !
It’s one thing to claim having fast Acid3 rendering and WebGL if one cannot enjoy WebGL and have medium HTML5 CSS3 rendering, benchmarks debunking the truth.
Now that gives Opera 15 more credit, since it’s official launch from yesterday. But much of the credits goes to Blink, so it’s not really Opera’s fault/work.
Kochise, long time Opera fan, yet pragmatic.
If you don’t like your browser spying on you why don’t you try: https://ixquick.com/
I use https://startpage.com made by same guys that did ixquick.
Thing is the browser can spy on you regardless of search engine. And search engine can track you apart from browser.
A high privacy solution will imply a browser like Firefox, Srware Iron, Opera 15 and a search engine like startpage and ixquick.
Posting this from Opera 15 myself but I’m finding it has a bit of catching up to do unfortunately. It does feel swifter than Opera 12 and has a bit of a cleaner look to it. But it is missing a number of features that I really liked from previous versions of Opera. Or even what you would expect from a modern browser these days. No ability to add search engines currently.
No true bookmarks solution. My wife misses the RSS reader and Notes from the previous version so she is refusing to upgrade until there is a decent replacement. I definitely miss being able to have a Diigo button in the toolbar. You can hack in Chrome extensions but the Diigo one doesn’t work. No customization of the interface or customized gestures/keyboard shortcuts.
I’ll stick it out for a while as I expect they’ll fix a number of these issues as they go along. I do think they are tossing aside a number of their less patient user base needly though. It would have been better to hold off on a release until they had implemented some more of these features.
FF might be king of the hill for some folks, but it’s not king of the hill for me yet since in areas that matters to me like rendering speed, page loading, javascript engine it is behind Chrome and Opera 15, even if not by much.
Certainly FF has tremendously improved in all areas and if speed is not what matters to you most, it might be the best browser.
Good thing, competition.
Your statement makes no sense. The entire point of the article is that Firefox beat the other contenders over all in regards to performance. Did it win in all categories and benchmarks? No. Did it have the best score all around? Yes.
Edited 2013-07-03 21:43 UTC
I use the browser for browsing the web. Maybe you have other usage scenarios?
If the browser is slow at loading web pages, it is not the best browser for me.
But does it really matter if Chrome is a bit faster at page loading if a quarter of the pages are broken when they load?
Hail to the king!, baby.
Is not only the fastest, it is also the one who has the better Javascript implementation, this works on FF but not in the other browsers:
let a = 10
and this:
x = (a,b)=>(a+b)
Thank you Firefox.
Edited 2013-07-03 15:04 UTC
Actually it is the faster to startup. Page load i.e. browsing is slower and I suspect javascript is slower, but can’t tell from those two js benchmarks, one of them is even dated.
Edited 2013-07-03 18:56 UTC
I wonder what real impact these differences in speed have on people’s productivity when browsing the web?
To me being able to manage tabs multiple tabs more efficiently, or even small time-saving touches like streamlined menus and toolbars with just the options I need, make more of a real world difference than an extra half second loading a page.
For me, with much of my day-to-day browsing, Chrome is actually the slowest browser by a mile. Open too many tabs on a slower PC (like the mini-laptop I use for quite a lot of browsing) and it crawls so slowly that it can take 5+ seconds just to switch between tabs. Of course by then the tab bar, on a small screen, is packed full and hunting for a particular page wastes even more time.
That’s the kind of thing that benchmarks like this don’t show up, but to me they’re things that matter much more.
Actually, the nice thing is that Tom’s roundup includes other important factors than just simple raw performance. For instance, reading it one can figure out that while Chrome loads pages more quickly, it also loads them less reliably. Likewise, while Chrome performs very well with HTML5, it uses far more memory.
Thankfully it seems that Mozilla isn’t just racing to the bottom with these things. They’re definitely playing catch-up in some respects, but I get the impression that other browser vendors are obsessing over certain metrics while Mozilla is obsessing over others.
Power usage, for instance. Some vendors have been shouting about how much more power-efficient their browsers are, but does it really matter when I can get to my content twice as fast in Firefox anyway? It would be interesting to see a benchmark that could take the human factor into account..
WTF is with Firefox’s numbering system? It’s really goofy. You log in some other system, and you don’tknow whether 12 or 18 or 20 is really outdated or ok to use. Switch the numbering back to version and release!
Other than that, a great browser.
Help -> About Firefox.
I’ve recently switched from Chrome to Firefox 21. Chrome was driving me crazy because it refused to save passwords on Google accounts. Yes, *Google* Chrome wouldn’t save passwords for *Google* accounts. Pretty dumb. Yes, I know about multiple user profiles on Chrome, but I don’t like using them. Additionally, Chrome changed a Flash buffer setting that made streaming audio unusably choppy. There was also a bug where my internet connection would temporarily drop, and Chrome would fail to detect that the connection was back up. Even new tabs would fail, claiming there was no connection. I would have to restart the entire Chrome browser to make it connect again. Chrome also lacked a tiny but critically important feature for me– When I am working through a long list of links I open each one in a new tab, process the new tab, close it, and then return to the parent tab. But Chrome, unlike Firefox, does not show a little dotted underline mark under the most recently opened link, making me lose my place in a long list. And finally, Chrome was no longer fast to launch like it used to be.
So I switched to Firefox 21. I don’t really like it either. It’s slow to launch, and the interface frequently feels slow. Obviously due to its design, a slow script on any page freezes the entire UI. Rendering speed is fairly fast. I absolutely hate the combined “Firefox” menu that appears when the menu bar is disabled. Certain options that are available in the normal menu bar are simply not available in the combined menu. Really stupid, because the combined menu like Chrome has is normally a nice space saver, and there’s no reason to not make certain options visible. And certain key Chrome features (like highlighting search term locations on the page with little tick marks in the scrollbar) are only available via extensions in Firefox, some of which feel like a bit of a hack.
So, I’m not very happy with the “big two” browsers. Looking forward to trying Firefox 22.
Edited 2013-07-03 16:00 UTC
Like what?
I’m not the original poster, but the examples I’d give are the contents of the View and Tools menus. Want to zoom in or out, or reset the zoom level? The regular menubar has entries under View, but there’s no equivalent for the compact Firefox menu. And the Tools menu has an option for clearing recent history, likewise with no obvious equivalent in the compact menu.
^^^
This
For that I use the shortcuts, anyway, you still have access to the full menu while using the combined one:
Press ALT+V for the View menu, ALT+T for the tools menu, etc.
For zooming I would use CTRL+mousewheel. You could also drag zoom controls in Firefox. The new Firefox menu has zoom controls so maybe you are right and people really wanted to zoom a lot with the Firefox menu.
Well, I’m on Firefox 22 now. No noticeable improvements or regressions compared with Firefox 21.
I updated my Firefox 21 to Firefox 22. As soon as 22 loaded, I got a bunch of error messages about not being able to find dlls. I installed 21 again and watched all those dlls magically reappear in the Firefox dir. So, I copied them to a temp dir, installed 22 again and watched them all vanish. I copied them back into the Firefox dir from my newly made temp copy and errors are gone now.
I don’t know if this is a bug in their installer, if they moved those dlls elsewhere and didn’t update Firefox to look in the new location, or what. Either way, something like that should have been caught before 22 was released publicly.
For the record, I’m running Windows 7 64bit.
And somehow millions of users kept quiet and said nothing. Or could it be that this is a rare bug that only sometimes gives problems? Or faulty hardware?
Either way, if you(maybe with the help of mozilla)find out if there is a problem you should share it.
That’s really weak sarcasm for a myriad number of reasons. And btw, faulty hardware doesn’t make dlls appear/disappear according to which version of an app you’re installing.
Edited 2013-07-04 00:41 UTC
Other than the relative performance of the browsers the thing that hasn’t been mentioned on this site or much is WebRTC support which is far more interesting IMHO.
WebRTC with p2p camera and mic connection between browsers is fucking awesome. I have essentially built an open standards version of Skype for my own edification on the new proposed features.
I suggest checking out http://twelephone.com/ (not made by me … wish it was).
Hey, that’s pretty slick. Thanks for the link. I wish it would let me create a standalone account, since I don’t use Twitter.
The library that they are using is called “holla.js” and is a library for node.js and is open source.
http://bloggeek.me/nodejs-webrtc/
I’ve been playing with it but haven’t got anything past a proof of concept. Hopefully when they have an IRC channel up I might actually get a bit further with my app.
I think WebRTC has the potential to change the world.
And it’s not just for the browser you can make desktop and mobile apps with it too, it’s mostly a protocol and there are libraries for it.
Thus it can be used for many, many applications and it’s encrypted by default.
Basically it allows for P2P real time communication.
Audio, video and also data. And it’s always encrypted.
There is however no signaling (like XMPP or SIP) but this thus also allow it to be really flexible.
On the audio side, the codec it supports, Opus, is new and was designed for changing environments. Part of it was derived from a codec from Skype.
It can also use the same audio codec which is supported by many VoIP systems.
Video codecs is where the issue is at, it’s not defined in the standard yet, there are people for patented H.264-like and more free WebM/VP8-like, but it can be worked around. And even if video is problematic it would allow for many, many useful things.
Doing video conferencing with more than 4 people is less than ideal, you’d want to use one or more central servers.
I’ve seen applications like:
– video chat
– audio chat
– text chat
– screensharing (not just the browser)
– file exchange
– collaborative editing
It can also pierce NAT like Skype or use a relay if it really can’t work around NAT. The relay only sees encrypted data.
There are even people working on Push Notification. So you can receive notification of new calls even if your browser or app isn’t open.
Some say it’s the next best application/protocol of the Internet after the web.
The best thing would be if a protocol similar to VoIP is build on top which connect to a different identity, like your email address.
It could be like VoIP/SIP where everything is mostly interoperable or like not like a lot of the instant messaging systems.
There are 3 big webcompanies involved with WebRTC, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla. Also the Skype team and companies like AT&T and Ericsson
Edited 2013-07-04 13:28 UTC
Even though Google closed Gtalk/Hangouts from interoperability? And why would MS be involved with the closed Skype?…
Let’s see, their are a few reasons.
But it is like asking why did Ericsson get involved with the development of the mobile phone system because they already had a really nice big share in existing telephony networks. The answer is simple: to be the expert in whatever is going to happen anyway.
On WebRTC and Microsoft specifically:
Because it is just a protocol, it’s going to happen anyway, might as well try to influence what the protocol will look like and possibly slowdown it’s development.
And don’t worry, “signaling” is not part of the protocol. So you can use it with other existing protocols/application/social network (their own user base).
Any other reason Microsoft might be involved is because Skype probably already was involved before Microsoft bought them.
An other reason might be because people don’t want plugins anymore. Remember that Microsoft Windows 8/Windows RT Metro environment doesn’t allow plugins either I believe.
Edited 2013-07-06 18:25 UTC
No need for MS conspiracy theories :p
I was just wondering why MS Skype division would be involved while they have their own mature tech… “just a protocol” means they simply want to use it themselves, I suppose.
This is like managing your 401K… you can keep switching funds every other day but it’s probably best to stick with one. I personally find so much utility in chrome’s profile switching to manage all my google accounts for personal+work+other stuff that any small annoyances are not that big a deal.
And now we yawn. The difference is in practice, none.
no, but I’m looking at email clients again because they all STINK
I keep saying that I’m going to switch browsers, but it never happens. I’m still on Firefox. I’m still using my old profile (dating back to when Firefox had sane GUI defaults), so for now Firefox works fine. I cringe when I boot a modern live CD and am greeted by the “new” default interface and settings.
Once I lose this profile, the only thing keeping me on Firefox will be a couple of extensions, which are becoming less and less of a problem as alternatives are on Chrome. The problems with rapidly-depreciating Firefox extensions due to an overly-fast development model seems to have been resolved (for the most part), and so have the memory leaks.
Honestly, it’s getting to the point where all the browsers really are practically the same. They’re all memory hogs yet at the same time being increasingly being dumbed down. The real problem is that I dislike the way Chrome has went–which on its own is fine, I just wouldn’t use it–but now that everyone else is making a clone of Chrome, I’m stuck with it or something disturbingly similar.
I don’t know why, with its open nature, Firefox wasn’t forked at 2.x or 3.6.x, back when its GUI was at its peak or at least just before it went all Chrome. There was enough complaining to warrant a fork. I guess no one wanted to undertake such a task (which, no doubt, would have been a difficult job).
Either you don’t understand that websites are becoming memory hogs or your profile makes Firefox do weird things.
But from what you write here there is no pleasing you.
Oh, web sites are a part of the problem too. No denying that. At this point, many of them actually *are* worse than the browsers they run in. But that’s not to say that browsers themselves haven’t exploded over the last several years.
I don’t agree with that assessment. Most browsers have a memory report now to see why it is using memory. If you take Firefox 1.0 and add features like a jit, type inference, anti phishing, databases, gpu acceleration etc. it uses 40MB instead of 32MB at startup.
Everything above that 40MB is either extensions or websites. Try about:memory
What do you think a browser should use?
I don’t care about what little individual bits and pieces of a browser use. It all adds up, and the end result is what matters. I care what a brand new, clean instance of a browser takes up with no web page open… and it shouldn’t be anywhere near 200 MB. That’s a whopping 20% of the total memory I have, with no web page even open! That’s just ridiculous. Think about that for a second: should a web browser even have to take over 100 MB just to display a blank page? I seriously don’t think so.
Sure… you could argue, get rid of the extensions, they take up memory. That only shaves off maybe about 50 MB… and 150 MB is still high. And you’re still stuck with a browser hogging an unacceptable amount of memory on its own before you even enter a URL.
So have you looked at about:memory?
top and htop work perfectly fine to get the measurements I need, but since you insist:
about:memory Explicit Allocations:
185.77 MB (100.0%) — explicit
…
about:memory Other Measurements:
251.84 MB ^a”EUR^a”EUR resident
239.42 MB ^a”EUR^a”EUR resident-unique
htop reading: 238M
So, again, what was the point of going through all that crap and looking through dozens of smaller values when I only care about the grand total–which any system monitor should return accurately? The end result is that the browser itself shows a very similar “total memory usage,” and that’s what I care about.
Note: The above was measured on a completely fresh copy of Firefox after completely exiting the previous instance. The only difference compared to my previous tests was that I went to “about:config” immediately after running the browser (which was, again, set to start with a blank page) and before taking any measurements, so they should all be in line.
Edited 2013-07-04 22:21 UTC
Meh… I meant to say that I went to about:memory. I’m so used to following “about:” with “config” it’s not even funny.
Because you still don’t know why it is using that memory.
Mozilla measures memory usage of each build: https://areweslimyet.com/
This is my about:memory: http://pastebin.com/vAZywjmu
Edited 2013-07-05 06:53 UTC
How much more clear do I have to be: I DO NOT CARE why Firefox is using the memory it is using. As a user, I just don’t f***ing care. What I care about is HOW MUCH it uses. And a completely fresh, empty browser window taking 150+ MB is *not* light, which brings me back to my original point. Because I’m just running circles trying to get the point across to you, I’ll just end this discussion here.
Edited 2013-07-05 07:12 UTC
For example, when I just ran about:memory on my Firefox it showed me that plus.google.com was using about 55 MB in the browser. I closed that tab and voila, Firefox shrank by about 50 MB.
Almost all of the google web pages are more Javascript application than HTML page and use large amounts of RAM.
Doesn’t matter when what I’m concerned about is that Firefox is consuming ~200 MB doing nothing, displaying no web pages, on a fresh start…
Lets blame iffy behaviour on what the end of the day is a set of text files on your machine.
How the fuck does a set of text files affect the reliability of a native desktop application? Obviously there is some iffy coding going on.
BTW I use Firefox.
Your whole computer is working on a set of text files be they machine code or computer languages. Mozilla is afraid of losing your data by converting and optimizing it so they are very careful. A nice example is a sqlite optimization where you get a 2-4 speedup. It was only activated on a new profile. Now they are trying to update every profile. To me it is very little effort to create a new profile and go on with what I was doing. So just to be sure my Firefox stays optimized I create a new profile about every 6 months. Especially because I run every nightly build as my daily browser.
So they can’t make a temp file or a backup file while they do that.
Keep on coming up with excuses and I will keep on coming up with easy ways they could have mitigated it.
I am typing this on nightly.
Edited 2013-07-04 21:23 UTC
Sure. That solution would work for nerds. Nerds can also make a new profile. Normal users will just complain Firefox ate their data.
So you don’t have a argument as to why they didn’t make up a process for older profiles.
Whether I can piss about with profiles is irrelevant, it has to be done transparently to the user. Which Firefox fails at by your own admission.
Edited 2013-07-04 21:29 UTC
Because it would be really really difficult. They would have to choose between developing ion-monkey and this profile converting tool.
Converting a text file is now difficult … PLEASE!
(double post)
Edited 2013-07-05 06:48 UTC
Could be. Do you know of a similar piece of software that does this? Windows does not do this while they have billions.
a) The windows profile is much more complex than the Firefox profile (it least I hope so. It would not speak well of Firefox design otherwise)
b) you update Windows a lot less often than Firefox (so maybe MS do’t care about this feature).
Edited 2013-07-05 11:34 UTC
Profile migration isn’t rocket science. We’re not talking about some homegrown browser with 2 devs, we’re talking about a major consumer product.
Clearly they don’t give a shit about this feature or otherwise it would already have been implemented.
Actually, profile migration IS a bit like rocket science when you have a product this big and this customizable. Even the smallest change to something could break settings in third-party modules (add-ons/plugins) and you don’t have control over those.
Other browsers have fewer profile-related issues precisely because Firefox is so customizable by comparison. Mozilla should be held to a high standard, of course, but it’s easy to forget that.
I’ve tried switching to Chrome as my main browser 2 or 3 times, after various frustrations with earlier versions of Firefox. But in Firefox I typically have at least a dozen windows open and upwards of a hundred tabs (on busy days, when juggling a lot of different things, it can hit 40 windows/300+ tabs). And Firefox handles that surprisingly well, RAM permitting – but I find Chrome starts to get sluggish once I reach 5 windows/50 tabs or so, mainly in terms of taking a long time to show page content when switching tabs. I’ve also found that, all things being equal (same windows/tabs open in both browsers), Chrome uses more RAM that FF – I would assume that’s a downside of its one-process-per-tab model.
And while I don’t go as crazy as some with installing add-ons, there are a few FF add-ons that I depend on & haven’t been able to find equivalents for in Chrome. Mainly tab hunter (let’s you search open tabs by title/URL) and It’s All Text (gives you a keyboard shortcut to open the contents of any textarea in an external editor). And I haven’t found anything for Chrome that comes close to SessionManager, the most reliable way I’ve found to preserve Chrome settings is to just “taskkill /f /im” the process.
So these days, I typically have both of them open – with Firefox serving as my main browser, and Chrome (Iron, actually) with 1-2 windows open for stuff it does better. E.g. I’ll usually switch over to Chrome for any browser-based uploading, since it shows a progress indicator – and I find Chrome a bit more stable for stuff like that, though in fairness I’m using Chrome for less & I’m also using the “Aurora” branch of Firefox (though I find Aurora on Win7 more stable than “stable” Firefox on XP, so YMMV). Though I’ve been using Chrome less on my laptop lately, since it’s developed a nasty habit of crashing my video driver in the last 2 or 3 months.
Being a web-dev I have 4 browsers open and two virtual machines with “proper” IE8 and IE9.
Maybe it the power of my machine at work (8 CPU Xeon), but Chrome never becomes sluggish while Firefox does.
It is odd that people have such different experiences.
Better to get rid of such browsing habits… (and I speak from experience; for me, the too-many-tabs habits were enabled by Opera)
Edited 2013-07-06 18:04 UTC
I find that to be the most efficient way to work using a browser, at least for me. I find it faster to leave windows/tabs open that I’m likely to need again in the near future – and I tend to open most things in new tabs, because I prefer being able to just switch tabs rather than waiting for websites/web-based applications. Then once a week or so, I go through and close any tabs/windows I don’t need anymore.
And Firefox handles that surprisingly well, at least with TabHunter and SessionManager installed. It also helps that, when restoring a session in recent versions, Firefox only loads pages in the active tabs.
Wasn’t my experience – FF tended to lose session file. Luckily, we have a choice in browsers :p
With something like the Session Manager add-on, you don’t have to “get rid” of the habit, you can just keep a set of tabs as a single session that’s only opened when you want it to be. That way you only keep the tabs you want open, and sets of them are organized in a logical manner.
Of course, that’s assuming you have so many tabs because you need them, like a cluttered desk that only you can make sense of. If it’s just tabs you don’t care about much yet don’t close, then yes: that’s a habit to adjust (use bookmarks, that’s what they’re for).
Opera had session management built-in …but it’s still better to get rid of the habit.
And apart from bookmarks there’s also saving pages to disk (which Opera did nicely, as single archive; no “html + file directory” crap)
Firefox has one killer feature, which apparently Chrome developers are unable to implement:
A setting to turn of tabbed browsing.
This setting alone makes me loyal to Firefox and Chrome can only be considered a toy for now.
I am very curious as to why you need this feature to such an extent that its absence makes other browsers seem like toys? I am the opposite… the absence of tab capabilities makes a browser feel broken for me.
Firefox needs to figure out how they can integrate their browser into the Google Ecosystem. If I could get bookmark/web history/ Password sync with my Google account then I would be tempted to try their browser. Right now I am locked into Chrome (and happy with it) because I enjoy the seamless integration with Google’s Ecosystem.
Funny, I keep hearing from others who are MUCH happier with Firefox because it DOESN’T strongly integrate with any particular ecosystem.. especially Google’s.
Why on earth would anyone in their right mind want more Google in their lives?
Last year I made the switch from Firefox to Chrome just to try it out and was immediately hooked. Having a Google account and mostly using Google’s services, Chrome and its sync feature has been great for me. The only thing missing at first was mouse gestures which later on became available in the Extensions store. Now when friends and family complain about their browser, I send them to download Chrome.
I guess there are more people stuck on Google services than I thought. I tend to recommend a browser based on the user’s needs, but that’s just me. It’s not like we’ve only got two options anymore.
Switched to Chrome until FF fixes copy/paste
I haven’t seen any recent bug reports about breaking copy/paste entirely, so if you’re sure it’s not a wayward add-on or profile issue, I’d strongly recommend opening a Bugzilla ticket just in case they’re unaware of it.
I’ve been a Firefox user since it’s very first version arrived back in 2004 when it was called Firebird. Before that, I was a staunch Netscape user; I have always detested Internet Explorer (and Microsoft products in general.) When I made the permanent switch to Linux, my trusty Firefox came right along with me. I’ve tried Chrome here and there and even Opera once; even though these are great browsers, I’ve grown accustomed to Firefox and I prefer it. The huge array of plugins and addons extend its features even further. I’ve never had any issues other than the occasional font problem, but that’s usually quickly sorted.
I agree with you that all the addons and plugins for Firefox is a huge plus. Firefox is my main browser, with IE as a back for those times when something is wrong with Firefox. Between those two, I’ve never had a need to use any other browser. They work perfectly fine for me. I did, though, use Netscape, way back ages ago.
Phoenix, not Firebird – that was its 2nd name, before Firefox