Recently I read a link from Gizmodo (“… I’m going back to Firefox“, after eliding a curse at the beginning of the link) where a developer was deciding to abandon Google Chrome for Mozilla’s Firefox browser.
The article suggested that Chrome was bloated, slow, crashing often, used far too much disk and memory space, used too many processes, and a few other such things. The implication was that the Firefox community was more responsive and as a result Firefox was faster, cleaner, and nicer to use.
The article wasn’t exactly strong on objective reasoning.
It did, however, get me thinking: I’ve been less satisfied with Chrome than I think I should be lately, so in the interests of the constancy of change, I decided to switch back to Firefox as a default browser.
So far, it’s not been a bad switch at all. Firefox is fast, and mostly I appreciate the lesser system impact – it does seem to be using fewer processes and less memory.
I don’t actually care if it does use less memory or fewer processes. Heck, it might use more. But the impression I have of it is that it’s lighter. Therefore, I’m happier; if it’s actually heavier but feels lighter, that’s a win for Firefox.
Using Firefox is actually pretty nice, too. The main thing I notice about the default configuration is that in Chrome, having forty tabs open shows you forty actual tabs – or as many as can be fit on the tab bar, with a preference to showing the existence of the tab (over showing you part of the title of the tab’s contents). Firefox wants to show me the tab title, and is happy to hide the extra thirty-five tabs to do so.
It turns out that Tab Mix Plus is happy to help address that particular aspect of the browser… so we’ll see.
So far, Firefox is doing well. I can’t say that it’s the best thing ever, or that I might not find myself moving back to Chrome sometime soon, but so far, I’m happy with Firefox.