Today I kicked my nasty Firefox habit for good. At first it was great, opening tabs of your favourite sites and debugging code with Firebug, blocking ads with AdBlock and all was well. Then once everyone was hooked, Firefox became a drunken abusive browser drunk off of its rising popularity and usage. What was once a, “how was your day sir” type of relationship then turned into a, “fuck you I’ll load that website in a few seconds, give me more ram and CPU” relationship.
I didn’t think I could do it. Chrome has always looked nice to me, but I could never bring myself to actually try a new browser, the age old problem of being stuck in an abusive relationship and not wanting to leave because you still love the person, in this case a web browser called Firefox.
What actually drove me to make the switch is the memory leak issues. Firefox for a very long time has had a nasty habit of taking ram and not giving it back, mostly due to plugins leaking memory like a bucket with holes in the bottom. I know a fix has just been submitted that will be out soon, bit it’s a little too late to make amends. In fact just recently my Firefox has been using after a few hours 3.5gb of ram that continues to climb.
Thanks for making other browsers innovate and take note of web standards, but you’ve become the old station wagon and Chrome is the new shiny sports coupe with the all leather interior.
I had a hard time letting go too. I left Firefox for the very same reason. I love Chrome now. I think Firefox is clunky now when I have to test in it. My poor computer with only 2G of RAM struggled and I got tired of having to shut it down to work.
@Alicia
You really notice the speed differences once you switch to Chrome. I’m impressed and I think I’m used to the Chrome developer tools now, they’re just as good as Firebug although I never used to a fan. Firefox have a long way to go if they want to keep up in the browser race.