Comments on: Back to Firefox

By: Apphacker

Apphacker — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 23:52:12 +0000

Operator error means it’s not an issue with Chrome, it means it’s an issue with you.

By: ritchie

ritchie — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:32:23 +0000

I’m constantly using FF, Chrome and IE, saves a lot of user-switching. All three of them have their pros and cons, but I definitely agree about the “large head”; also, FF gets very RAM-hungry when you run a couple of extensions… plus it seems that Chrome’s JS engine is a lot faster.

By: Pat

Pat — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 01:18:53 +0000

Interesting. I tried the SQLite vacuuming and it did shave off nearly 10 MB total from my profile’s .sqlite files.

Startup time is the exact same for me, but the AwesomeBar and general usage is much faster with 17 (wow) add-ons. A lot less hangups.

By: SirG

SirG — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 05:13:59 +0000

Matt,
I’ve recently switched back to Firefox as well, but due to the excessive RAM usage in Chrome.

I only had half a dozen to eight extensions installed, and a single window with 10 to 15 tabs open would cause Chrome to eat up 1.5GB or RAM or more… which would in turn spike the pagefile usage and slow the entire system down – simply unacceptable in my eyes!

Since switching back I’ve missed the fast load times of Chrome, however there is a fix – essentially, the SQLite databases need to be “vacuumed”.

This site has the instructions http://www.webupd8.org/2009/07/increase-firefox-3-perormance-by.html

I’ve also come across the “Pale Moon” browser, I know it’s a bit of a strange name, but it’s an optimized build of Firefox with better memory usage.

http://www.palemoon.org/

Pale Moon actually uses the favorites, extensions and cache of Firefox. The only issue I’ve found so far is an occasional page rendering issue, but a Shift+Refresh seems to fix it.

Btw, thanks for WordPress!

:0)

By: staticd

staticd — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 03:13:19 +0000

I am not really sure why folks switch *from* firefox when it’s an open source project and the whole point is that the _community_ makes it better and do whatever we want it to!

By: Blake Helms

Blake Helms — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 00:24:55 +0000

On the PC side I am 100% Chrome. I can’t stand FF and it’s nasty memory leaks. On the Mac I find myself flip flopping between Chrome and Safari mainly because of 1Password

By: Willie

Willie — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:44:49 +0000

Matt, a few weeks ago I’ve als switched back from Chrome to Firefox and find myself never looking back. The awesome showed great improvements in speed and it’s unbeatable as well as the rich feature set. The only thing I use Chrome for is for its inspector when coding webs. G.

By: John Sostak

John Sostak — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 08:34:12 +0000

Hey Matt. I use a mac, and tried Chrome. Worked well, I didn’t have problems with a corrupt file, but it lacked the extensions like Alexa and Ping Fire on Firefox. It also felt different. When you use the same browser for years, it’s not easy to switch. To be honest, I don’t really care for Safari. I hate to sound like an old man, but I’m going to hang onto Firefox, until they give me some really great reason to change. What that would be? I don’t know. Good thread, Matt Cutts isn’t missing your posts:)

By: elissa

elissa — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 04:27:13 +0000

I tried Chrome after friends gave rave reviews and just couldn’t do it. It was always locking up and crashing on me. I can’t deal with Firefox, either — too slow and always crashing. The only thing that’s been pretty dependable for me is Safari.

By: Chee Yi

Chee Yi — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 04:06:43 +0000

I’m facing the same problem with you, Matt. Chrome annoyed me to no tomorrow by crashing itself whenever I visit some sites, for example (OMG!) Twitter and sometimes Facebook.

2 of the world’s most famous social networking site crashes when I use Chrome, how ironic.

By: Hannes

Hannes — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:07:53 +0000

I’ve been considering switching from Firefox to Chrome because more and more people around me say it’s their primary browser, but I haven’t been convinced yet.

By the way, if you want to search your Twitter stream you might want to check out http://snapbird.org – I always use it when I want to find an old tweet of mine.

By: Hong Xiaowan

Hong Xiaowan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:56:47 +0000

once i use firefox as wordpress client, but i fill it slow, then i transfered to microsoft writer, slow.

now i installed wordpress at hosting, then ask hosting company open connect to my pc, then i install wordpress in my local pc, and use opera, closed javascript…

for pure text, this very fast.

By: TheTick

TheTick — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:36:02 +0000

I use Chrome if I just want to open a browser window really quick to check something and close it again. Firefox is my main production browser, just because I have all my favorite extensions set exactly how I want.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:18:32 +0000

I haven’t. What’s the advantage over using Firefox + Thunderbird?

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:17:37 +0000

It might be operator failure, but as the operator that’s the main type of failure I care about. I wasn’t writing a review, just my experience.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:15:22 +0000

Thanks for the help! I’ll try it again in a few months.

By: woddfellow2

woddfellow2 — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:08:57 +0000

I have used Chromium as my main browser since late last year. Firefox often does this when I close it.

By: iamronen

iamronen — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:45:35 +0000

I recommend Mozilla’s new Weave (you can find it directly in the addons) instead of xmarks…

Does everything better, does more and is completely private (this is the first time I have opted to sync passwords as well… I didn’t trust xmarks enough for that!)

By: Manu

Manu — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:38:54 +0000

Firefox flash plugin and chrome’s are very different at least on mac. Firefox will use 40% CPU while playing a youtube video while chrome would use 100%

You can try chrome with any of the flash blocking extensions.

By: Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:35:22 +0000

I checked with a few folks and it sounds like a corrupted profile, which is something that Chrome could handle better–there’s a bug opened about this.

The “stealing user focus” stuff sounds like possible side effects of using a debug Flash player, but it definitely makes things more irritating.

My hunch is that after you made a new profile, if you installed Xmarks again, it would have pulled your bookmarks back in–after that the biggest annoyance is probably losing autocompletion of logins. I think that we’ll improve that help center article to include more explicit instructions. Sorry that you had such a bad experience though.

By: Paul Hodgson

Paul Hodgson — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:14:37 +0000

Hey Matt, just curious if you’ve ever used the mozilla combined web browser/email client called Seamonkey?

By: Apphacker

Apphacker — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:49:35 +0000

The frequent “Oh Snap!” failure was due to an unfortunate acid3 bug that’s since been patched. Had you enabled auto updates? You can enable auto updates from the about dialog. This doesn’t seem like a fair review, and more like operator failure.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:38:34 +0000

It was on Windows. I don’t have any recollection of switching channels so I was probably no stable. One of the things that frustrated me is when it would “Oh snap” there was nothing on the page except the link to the help above. If there had been a way to submit the URL or a debug upstream I wouldn’t have felt as bad about it, but because there wasn’t I felt helpless.

By: Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:18:57 +0000

Matt, was this on Mac, Windows, Linux? Do you mind if I ask what channel of Chrome were you using (stable, beta, dev)?

By: Adrian Thiele

Adrian Thiele — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:01:43 +0000

I agree with you on the Firefox points,
it gobbles up memory and CPU.
I’m loving Opera too, and I’m starting
to get more and more comfortable with it.
Learning that control- enter is the way
to insert your stored passwords into login pages made it ten times more pleasurable for me.