Left Firefox for Chrome

3 points by sixtofour ↗ HN
I love Firefox. Love it to pieces. I love the basic browser, and the addons that make it my personal browser.

But I can't bear the memory situation any longer. I have to restart it at least daily to make it give back memory. And after it's been running awhile it makes my low end laptop work so hard it sounds like the Batmobile spinning up its turbine.

I don't much like Chrome, but that's mainly because it isn't my customized Firefox; Chrome is a decent browser overall. The lack of tagged bookmarks is maddening, but I'm going to have to live without them.

I usually have a lot of tabs open, and as I close some I open more. Queue up a bunch of HN tabs and gradually work through them over the day. That's likely the root of my version of this problem, but it's my way of operating and so it's a problem for me. Maybe I'm holding it wrong.

But Chrome doesn't break a sweat, with 25 tabs open (not unheard of for me) or even 50 (my perverse experiment). And the beautiful thing is, as I close tabs, I can watch Chrome giving memory back.

I'll miss the vertical tabs, which I can't get to work on Ubuntu. I'll miss the self-contained It's All Text addon. I'll miss the just enough vim in vimkeybindings.

But I won't miss the screams and cries of my laptop.

Let's not say goodbye, Firefox. Let's just say au revoir.

3 comments

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I like Chrome too. But which version of Firefox? Supposedly the newest version is a bit better on memory use.
A bit? I don't run alpha/betas anyway.
Same here. Theres something about Firefox and Mozilla in general that feels more inviting to me, but its just seems dumb to use FF over Chrome these days, especially on my Mac. Hoping they turn things around in the next year, we'll see.