I just read an article entitled “Why I’m Switching (Back) to Firefox” by Cameron Paul. He explained that Firefox has made huge improvements in the past couple of years. Meanwhile Chrome has experienced slowness and memory issues as of late. Google is in it to make money while Firefox stands for “freedom and privacy on the web”
He goes on to say: “Chrome is starting to feel a lot like Firefox did in 2008.” Ouch.
It is true that Firefox has improved by a lot over the past 4 years. They have neat things for developers like command lines in the dev tool. At this point Firefox is more than capable to be used as your primary browser again. I use it on occasion, but mostly for testing purposes.
So is it time to switch? No.
They had my complete loyalty back in 2004-2008. Every one of us who used their browser said the same thing. It was slow and crashed all the time. Within those 4 years it felt like Firefox hardly improved at all. If anything the experience got worse up until 2010.
Firefox, and the state of web browsers in general, lacked innovation and vision. Chrome brought about the modern web as we know it. Without it, it would be impossible to develop javascript heavy applications that exist today.
Why did it take Google Chrome to come out in order for Mozilla to start to work on Firefox’s core issues? Memory, responsiveness, and page render speed were core problems that existed for years.
For the past four years Firefox has spent their time playing catch-up to Chrome. How can a browser that was out for a decade be so far behind Chrome technologically?
Since day one, Chrome handled extensions and tabs as separate processes to help alleviate memory issues. As far as I know, Firefox still does not operate in this manner.
Now, because Firefox has nearly caught up with Chrome, it’s time to switch?
Am I supposed to be impressed that Chrome finally gave them a roadmap to use?
Am I supposed to be impressed that they finally fixed their memory issues that lasted for 6 painful years?
If Firefox is about “freedom and privacy on the web”, then Google Chrome is about being as fast as possible and quick to adopt and develop cutting edge features.