I had this feeling since it changed the name to Firefox. Seamonkey got worse when it hit 2.0 as it adopted a lot of the new Firefox code making it an overall slower browser.

I was always puzzled, why a "faster and lighter" browser is slower than the full suite that was Seamonkey, and getting a ton of promotion and press.

Opera doesn't even have gpu acceleration... so browsing gpu accelerated sites is a pain... and some just don't work at all, like 3d cities on here.com.

I got sick of it when they started making new releases every few weeks. They went from version 4 to something like version 11 in under 6 months. They were releasing new versions before all the bugs could be reported and fixed in the previous versions. It's to the point now where the memory leaks are so bad that I can't even run it on my 6gb quad core AMD Phenom II system without it running out of memory and slowing to a crawl.

I have a Phenom II as well, bought it just because my A64 3700+ was having 100% CPU usage spikes all the time with flash videos. Well, now it doesn't do that anymore and I'm still getting dropped frames. In a lot of forums they say it's because of the auto-restore function saving stuff every so often, blah, blah... I tried so many fixes and it's always the same. As long as this problem isn't widely recognized they are never going to fix it.

I recommend giving Palemoon a try. It's based on Firefox, but with most of the bugs and stupid interface changes fixed.

All browsers have faults. FF's strength is in its add-ons; without those the browser would have most certainly died a long time ago. Chrome is quite a departure from 'old fashioned' browsing and has almost as many though different real-world issues as FF. IE is [now] fast but has few extensions and no 'cool appeal'.

I use Chrome at home and IE10 at work. Both work fine, but I like Chrome the most with its Google sync function and resizable input boxes (like the quick reply box) 😀

I'm actually impressed how much Internet Explorer has improved!

Reckless wrote:

IE is [now] fast but has few extensions and no 'cool appeal'.

IE is now fast? It was always fast for me until they hit IE7. It would've been awesome if they released the IE3 or IE6 source code under an open source license (of course microsoft being microsoft is 7044% to never happen)..

I'm not IE fan'ing this at all - it's the only browser I could usably use very well on a Pentium.

I should be clear and state openly I really don't care about performance measured by synthetic benchmarks. However, yes IE10 is fast.

I remember IE being really snappy around 04-05. No idea how it evolved since. With FF now you have to wait like 3-4 seconds every time you open a new window.

I don't like synthetic benchmarks and ACID tests either. IE3 didn't need no "GPU accelleration" to achieve smooth scrolling on animated gif heavy sites.

Security holes and broken support for standards are another story 😀 however what i'm really saying is that if Mozilla wants to live up to their "fast" words, they'd better step up their x86 assembly optimization and programming game and rely less on compilers taking forever to compile a build (what the hell is going on with that in a "fast browser" anyway)

Also the KHTML, Webkit and Blink forks are something funny to observe with similar "light" and "clean" excuses for reasoning.

Actually, I find Chrome consumed more memory than Firefox in my use. But then I tend to have 15-20 tabs open at any one time and Chrome runs each tab as a separate thread, where Firefox doesn't seem to do that. I was regularly seeing 3-4 gigs of memory use with Chrome, where Firefox tends to stay under 900MB most of the time, though I suspect there was an addon or plugin causing my high memory usage with Chrome.

d1stortion wrote:

I have a Phenom II as well, bought it just because my A64 3700+ was having 100% CPU usage spikes all the time with flash videos. Well, now it doesn't do that anymore and I'm still getting dropped frames. In a lot of forums they say it's because of the auto-restore function saving stuff every so often, blah, blah... I tried so many fixes and it's always the same. As long as this problem isn't widely recognized they are never going to fix it.

Open up task manager, processes, and see how much memory Firefox is using when it gets busy. On my 6gb system, seeing it spike up to 3-4gb and staying there for long periods is not uncommon. It seems like the more memory you have, the more it uses. On my laptop with 3gb of RAM, it regularly crosses 1.5gb and creeps dangerously close to 2gb of RAM usage.

Never seen that.. I've got 18 tabs open with a fair amount of image content, 1 youtube playing and... memory usage is 300MB. FF 17.something

sliderider wrote:

Open up task manager, processes, and see how much memory Firefox is using when it gets busy. On my 6gb system, seeing it spike up to 3-4gb and staying there for long periods is not uncommon. It seems like the more memory you have, the more it uses. On my laptop with 3gb of RAM, it regularly crosses 1.5gb and creeps dangerously close to 2gb of RAM usage.

Same here. I actually have 32-bit XP on my PC, so once it comes anywhere near the 3.25GB mark the swapping kills the whole PC. On my notebook with 6GB and 64-bit 7 it happily uses the full RAM and eventually becomes as unresponsive as on the PC, because I just put it on standby most of the times. Oh and when I have enough windows open it simply crashes. But that's not my main issue, I don't have any problems with simply restarting the PC when the RAM is full. The problem is that Flash should not drop one goddamn frame with such a CPU and ~8% CPU utilization. 😠

I recall reading about something like it's related to the particular Flash implementation in Firefox, meaning that they just tacked it on without caring too much. Too bad that HTML5 isn't any better and isn't available for all youtube videos anyway.

When you see excessive memory consumption, navigate to about:memory and look at what is being allocated. Hopefully that will shed some light onto where the problem could be.

I simply switched to Chrome on both PC and Macintosh tired of the Firefox Sync feature failing continuosly and my profle getting corrupted and forcing me to restore it. I also got utterly confused about new release cycles.

On my PPC Macs I have to use TenFourFox but maybe because I haven't got any other option it doesn't seem to bother me as much as the "regular" versions of Mozilla Firefox. Sad thing is that I was a faithful user right from the change to the name "FireFox".

Reckless wrote:

When you see excessive memory consumption, navigate to about:memory and look at what is being allocated. Hopefully that will shed some light onto where the problem could be.

Interesting, first time I hear about this command. Right now I see that about 600 MB are wasted on javascript stuff, even though I deactivated it.

People still use IE? I think the last time I ran IE was about ten years ago.