[m_gloeckl]

I've had a short fling with Chrome, when it was still fairly new and Firefox suffered from severe performance issues (during the 3.6.x era).

Today's picture is a little different. Sure, on JS heavy web applications and those optimized for Chrome (a few google maps based apps come to mind) Firefox gets outperformed by Chrome significantly.

Considering browser extensions: I still feel that Chrome extensions lack in functionality compared to their pendants on the Firefox platform. For example, I have yet to find a good mouse gestures addon that can restore a closed tab with its' history intact. I don't blame the addon authors, that seems to be much more a problem with the API.

Memory usage with a lot of opened tabs is also an issue for me. On my own machine at home, I do have a lot of spare memory, but at work not so much. I'm a messy person when it comes to tabs, I leave a lot of them open and never close them, because I might need to look up something later on. Firefox is surprisingly memory-efficient (which was not always the case in the past) with a lot of open tabs, while Chrome hogs memory like crazy. On my work machine, it forces the OS to swap and the whole systems hangs frequently.

The last thing is customizability. If I don't like a particular behaviour on Firefox, there's surely a way to change it. Be it keybindings or the amount of lines I want to scroll with one tick of the mouse wheel (There's even a possibility to set different settings for different modifier keys!), for most things there's a setting or (thanks to the rich extension API) an addon that does the job.

TL;DR: Chrome might be faster for some use cases, Firefox still thakes the cake in the overall user experience discipline

PS: User experience and preference is subjective. Competition and choice are good and everyone gets to use the tool of their choice.

[deepak-kumar]

I must agree to the fact that you can not blame addon authors for any slowdown or memory usage.