I switched back from Chrome to Firefox yesterday, opening every URLs and so every tabs opened in Chrome, spinning every tabs spinned in Chrome, and so on. 30 tabs in 2 windows, with the same set of extensions, with the standard theme and I checked the number of file descriptors — as older versions of Firefox were not using too much memory but a very high number of file descriptors — and the RAM.
The results, about three or four checks: Firefox does not use too much file descriptors, which is a good point — the two browsers use the same amount of them —, but consume now far more memory than Chrome, from 3 to 10 times, depending on my tests.
By the way, may be it is the cost to be paid for a faster display, I don’t know, but it’s at the expense of other opened applications!
A little point I also note: the combobox (dropdown lists) are still awful in Firefox, comparing with Chrome, at least on OS X!
Nice try Mozilla, but you can do better!
1 De ben_griffith -
I also tried Firefox 57 and I’m glad that they took over one important customisation from Seamonkey: you can move the Bookmarks and Bookmarks toolbar between Home button and URL address. Saving space is important on my home laptop.
About the speed, I have to use Google’s mail at work, and thought first that it’s so slow because I’m doing it in Seamonkey. I then opened Chrome, but it was even worse. Additionally, I can’t customise the bookmarks as in Seamonkey (and now in Firefox).
Summary: I shut down Chrome and said to myself I won’t try it again.
Firefox works on my systems much faster, but I don’t have 30 tabs open. We call this in German “Less is more”.
For my private use, I wouldn’t even think about using Chrome.
On my iPhone, I use Firefox which is much better than Safari. I also noticed the font difference in the drop-down menu in Firefox in Windows (you wrote about this in the article before).
2 De Franck -
You’re right, and globally speaking, it’s a big step that Mozilla have done since the previous release of Firefox. I think that they are on the good path (as they have, IMHO, some room for optimisation about memory consumption)