Why I am Dumping Firefox

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Computing on Demand has an editorial posted today called "Why I am Dumping Firefox." I figured you guys would have an opinion on this one. ;)

I really had high hopes for the latest version of Firefox, so much so that I sat and dealt with the same problems from the previous version waiting for an update to fix it. Firefox has come a long way since it debuted, but sometimes that road ahead can actually lead you backwards. With the slurry of new features present in Firefox 4, and even 3 for that matter, the project has failed to address one of the most problematic issues, memory usage.
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I haven't noticed any issues, besides occasionally taking a while to start up the browser, nothing wrong, I still like it.
 
Firefox started having load issues and crashing issues on my various machines. I switched to chrome, and haven't looked back sense.
 
I used to be able to go a week without restarting my browser in Firefox 3, but Firefox 4 is up to 2 GB every morning when I get into work. That's with a measly 4 tabs open. However, I blame extensions more than the browser itself.

Even with Firefox being the memory hog that it is, I prefer it over Chrome and IE9. I can't live without my extensions.
 
i used opera for a long time, but switched to FF and I dont really have a need to change
 
cowgod said:
I used to be able to go a week without restarting my browser in Firefox 3, but Firefox 4 is up to 2 GB every morning when I get into work. That's with a measly 4 tabs open. However, I blame extensions more than the browser itself.

Even with Firefox being the memory hog that it is, I prefer it over Chrome and IE9. I can't live without my extensions.
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^^^

I still love firefox, and use it for more work-intensive purposes (when I need all of my many, many, add ons). In such cases I think Chrome has still not caught up.

However, for standard browsing I mostly use chrome (well, a custom build) as it is faster, lighter, and a little bit more solid.
 
Outamyhead said:
I haven't noticed any issues, besides occasionally taking a while to start up the browser, nothing wrong, I still like it.
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Yeah same here. About the only annoying thing about Firefox is it takes 20+ seconds to fire up on cold boot. After that it runs and loads fine.
 
Chrome has been my browser of choice since Chrome first debuted. I have always hated the standard, cluttered browser UI that dates to Netscape, and Chrome was the first to fix that for me. Since then, it's continued improvements over FF, particularly in the speed and boot-time realm have cemented my usage with the big G.
I still keep FF on my system, and up to date, but Chrome is my primary browser, and will remain so.

That being said, I dislike F4 so much that IE9 has easily supplanted it at the number two spot. I find it faster, with better stock features.
 
I've used every version of Firefox since 1.0 through 4.0 (and I even have a portable 6.0a1 too) and I swear to some higher power on the graves of my parents and anybody else: I have never noticed such issues with memory usage, across thousands of installs, on thousands of machines, ever.

At least not with the browser itself.

Having said that, I have noted on some builds of Firefox (notably 2.x and 3.5.x builds) that some addons/extensions/plugins, or a particular combination of said items can sometimes - that's SOMETIMES trigger a leak that you can't really figure out. But I've done this stuff enough times to be able to do just that with extensive testing.

Suffice to say, in my experience, those "memory problems" are simply non-existent for me.

But some folks do seem to have a particular set of bad luck with Firefox, as that article writer apparently does.

Well, Mozilla certainly isn't going to subtract 1 from the number of worldwide downloads just on his behalf. :D
 
I didn't read the whole article, but if memory usage is his main reason to dump Firefox, he needs to get a life. 4GB of RAM is like, what, $35? $50 if you get the good stuff? The only time I've ever come close to using up my 4GB is when I had Chrome, Premiere, Encore, and some misc. programs open at the same time.

I switched to Chrome a little over a year ago and haven't looked back either. It's faster, sleeker, and more well thought out. Also, most of the extensions I originally had in Firefox are native in Chrome - I'm just waiting on a NoScript version and it'll be perfect.
 
Sabrewulf165 said:
If 234 MB is half of his system memory, he should probably get a new computer.
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This. I have 6GB of RAM, and I could care less if Firefox eats up a good chunk of it. If I still have 1.5GB free at worst, it's not affecting me.
 
FF4 starts up almost instantaneously on my PC. It's also feels just as fast, if not faster, than Chrome on my system. It will get up to 200MBish of RAM usage if I have a crap ton of tabs open or don't shut it down for a week.
 
Just as a sidenote, that article writer appears to be using a machine with 1GB of RAM, and yet is supposed to be taken seriously as a tech writer? And then he states "Hello Chromium" which is the development version of Chrome? Chromium is in perpetual beta and suffers from far more potential memory issues than Firefox could ever dream of.

So he's dumped a stable release browser for a development build that updates multiple times per day.

Ok, that's enough for me: the guy's a tard.

Anyone else agree? Anyone?
 
Mad Cat said:
This. I have 6GB of RAM, and I could care less if Firefox eats up a good chunk of it. If I still have 1.5GB free at worst, it's not affecting me.
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I have 9 GB in my current machine, but even when Firefox is using 2 GB of memory, it's still sluggish and basically unusable.
 
Half of his system ram?

Judging from his screenshot, Firefox is using ~256Mb, so are we to assume that in 2011 he's actually using a machine with only 512MB Ram?

RAM Is cheap, abundant and not a big deal. Up until recently I had 16GB in my main desktop. If the browser wants to use a few gigs of ram, I don't see the problem...

I like Firefox for its more extensive plugin catalog, and double rows of tabs. but I too prefer chrome these days. It's much snappier, and I like the "one process per tab" thing...
 
People also need to realize that some programs are set to take up as much RAM as they can. If the OS or something else needs it the app gives it back. Most people never notice how much RAM its taking up until the look in task manager then bitch up a storm that "ZOMG ITS TAKING GIGS OF RAMS!" when the machine is still running perfectly fine.

Also never mind the fact that it could be a bad coded page? Some flash/java bullshit?
 
I despise Chrome's interface. It may work for some but it doesn't for me. I like the old school design... If I didn't I'd get a Mac...
 
Both Firefox 3 and 4 load up in at most 2-3 seconds. But I only run one extension, so I guess those who are seeing 20 second boot times have a lot of add ons going.
 
cowgod said:
I used to be able to go a week without restarting my browser in Firefox 3, but Firefox 4 is up to 2 GB every morning when I get into work. That's with a measly 4 tabs open. However, I blame extensions more than the browser itself.

Even with Firefox being the memory hog that it is, I prefer it over Chrome and IE9. I can't live without my extensions.
Click to expand...



I am guessing thats extensions. I left firefox open on accident over the weekend, 20+ tabs including some youtube and I am sitting at 580mb of memory used. I only run adblock.

The only reason I do not use Chrome is because I dont want my entire life surrounded by Google. No conspiracy, just personal choice.
 
Looking over this guy's site it's patently obvious that he's peppered his "146 articles" with the big keywords so as to attract as much search ranking hits as possible. The quality of his writing is... ugh, and it's just so wrong it's not even funny.

Damn.
 
The only addon I run on FF is Firebug. Starts up in less than a second, and the only time I ever break 500-600 megs is after I've been on a lot of Flash sites and have viewed many large PDFs. On general browsing, though, no issues at all. I'm more indifferent to the browser wars, and I stick with Firefox since it does everything I want it to do, and I'm familiar with its intricacies. I have all the browsers on my computer if I ever have to check cross-browser compatibility, but I just prefer Firefox after using it since its first iteration however many years ago that was.
 
Ive noticed an increasing dumping of friefox over the years from site statistics. It used to have a nice chunk of the users, but after chrome appeared the same chunk seemed to split and be divded between chrome and firefox. IE stayed pretty much the same, as did the other low adoption browsers. I'm not really sure of the reasons why people are dumping firefox, as I used opera/IE but, at least for me, there's evidence for this happening.
 
Firefox is the only browser for me. I absolutely hate Chrome's UI. The inability to put the tabs back on the bottom, the shitty download manager, the way it hides everything under dozens of sub-menus. Everything about it just pisses me off.

IE 9 is the same way. Even less customization options than Chrome and an even worse UI - something I didn't thinkt was even possible. As far as Opera goes, well I have no reason to use it over Firefox.

So it's Firefox for me. As a side note, I've been using the Aurora 5.x build and I absolutely love it so far. Not as bleeding edge as nightly, but meant to be more stable. Win-win in my book.
 
Man IE 9 is oh so fine, fast, GPU accelerated, etc etc. Finally a replacement for IE 6, Firefox, Chrome whatever that works. I love the developer tools in it too.
 
Oh and I recently moved my Temp/Tmp and IE 9 cache to QSoft RAM Disk (4GB of my 16GB totaly) and wow the performance of IE9 is off the chart,
 
I prefer Chrome for daily use, and I only use Firefox when I want to use Firebug now. Firefox is still OK though I think. I doubt anyone really has problems with Firefox unless they load it down with an insane amount of plugins, some of which are inevitably not too well written.
 
So a person claiming "half his system RAM" with FF @ ~250MB, meaning 512MB total) is a person I'm supposed to listen to and heed advice from? HAHAHAHAHA! That's a great laugh.

I've been on 8GB of RAM for the last 3 years. Haven't below 4GB since...well I can't remember right now.

I like Chrome. I just like Firefox more and it's because of the add-ons. Chrome is getting there, but some of the add-ons I use just don't have quality counterparts in the Chrome ecosystem. Better Privacy (for deleting LSO cookies) is a good example. The only extension I find that deletes LSO cookies on Chrome is also bundled with all other types of crap like an malware scanner and a registry cleaner.

Not to mention NotScript is a poor man's knock off of NoScript and always will be because Google will never build all the API's necessary to truly port NoScript because of the ad blocking implications.
 
Joe Average said:
I've used every version of Firefox since 1.0 through 4.0 (and I even have a portable 6.0a1 too) and I swear to some higher power on the graves of my parents and anybody else: I have never noticed such issues with memory usage, across thousands of installs, on thousands of machines, ever.

At least not with the browser itself.

Having said that, I have noted on some builds of Firefox (notably 2.x and 3.5.x builds) that some addons/extensions/plugins, or a particular combination of said items can sometimes - that's SOMETIMES trigger a leak that you can't really figure out. But I've done this stuff enough times to be able to do just that with extensive testing.

Suffice to say, in my experience, those "memory problems" are simply non-existent for me.

But some folks do seem to have a particular set of bad luck with Firefox, as that article writer apparently does.

Well, Mozilla certainly isn't going to subtract 1 from the number of worldwide downloads just on his behalf. :D
Click to expand...

+juan

I've been a FF user since the pre-1.0 days, and have never had any problem with firefox, even after installing hundreds of times across hundreds of machines.
 
How can anyone on [H] possibly forgive unnecessary memory usage? I've got 4GB because I want that to be available for my apps, not to accommodate memory leaks. This is not the case of an application taking advantage of a Vista/Win7 feature. It's a bug.

Has anyone tried running FF with and without various plug-ins to determine whether it really is an extension developer's problem? And if it is, how many of those plug-ins are considered indispensible for an FF implementation?
 
What is this .. a slow news day? Why the heck has [H] even linked to this sorry excuse for an article??:rolleyes:

I thought maybe he had some kind of simple quantitative study done to explain his reasoning..
 
It's not a 512MB machine, folks. It's 1GB as I noted earlier, look at the pic:

dumpingfirefox01.jpg


Note the first 10 apps or so, that's about ~500MB of RAM usage just for those alone, and he's got 78 processes going to make up the rest, and it's showing 54% Physical Memory in use... so it's a 1GB box, perhaps even 1.25GB maybe.

Funny, sure. Sad, most definitely. :D
 
And aside from the issues other people are mentioning; A browser switching article that doesn't even feature Opera? It is to laugh.
 
With the release of FF4 I switched back from Chrome. Minefield wasn't enough to make me use it full time, but the final version convinced me; certain add-ons just don't function properly in Chrome, due to inability to gain full resource blocking.
 
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