I have used Chrome since it's inception. Before that I used Firefox. After feeling some nostalgia recently and having some romantic feelings about using and supporting OSS, I decided to install Firefox (on MacOS) and give it a try as my primary browser again.
I had three primary complaints that caused me to go back to Chrome after a couple days:
- The UI feels old and clunky compared to Chrome, although this is likely just a personal preference issue for me.
- Performance felt lacking. Pages seemed to take longer to render. The browser UI itself felt slower.
- Stability. On a few occasions within a couple day period, it seemed like one tab would lock up the entire browser. Firefox would pop up a vague message telling me that "one of your tabs" is causing an issue (not telling me which one) and then I would need to randomly close tabs to try and get things working properly again. This seems insane and archaic and is not something I ever deal with on Chrome.
Firefox needs to adopt the omnibar, yesterday. The plugin works well enough, but simply isn't as well-rounded as the Chrome omnibar for reasons that are hard to nail down.
> Performance felt lacking. Pages seemed to take longer to render. The browser UI itself felt slower.
Agreed. This is the main reason that I switched to Chrome late last year (after painfully using FF for two years). I'll probably only have another look at FF when Servo drops.
Are you using the Firefox with e10 enabled (go to about:support and look for "Multi-Processor Windows"). That makes a substantial difference in performance!
The compact theme from Firefox Developer Edition is coming to the Firefox release channel in 53 or so. The new compact theme will be optional and available in both dark and light versions.
> Firefox would pop up a vague message telling me that "one of your tabs" is causing an issue (not telling me which one) and then I would need to randomly close tabs to try and get things working properly again
Did you have any addons installed? LastPass is a bit notorious for this, even the e10s-compatible version is quite bad.
I had three primary complaints that caused me to go back to Chrome after a couple days:
- The UI feels old and clunky compared to Chrome, although this is likely just a personal preference issue for me.
- Performance felt lacking. Pages seemed to take longer to render. The browser UI itself felt slower.
- Stability. On a few occasions within a couple day period, it seemed like one tab would lock up the entire browser. Firefox would pop up a vague message telling me that "one of your tabs" is causing an issue (not telling me which one) and then I would need to randomly close tabs to try and get things working properly again. This seems insane and archaic and is not something I ever deal with on Chrome.