Fed up with Firefox
Published December 4, 2007 by Robbie
I’ve been a long time Firefox fan. I’ve been using it since the early betas, but I’m so fed up with it now that I’m officially switching to IE 7 (and this despite the fact that I don’t like the IE 7 UI). The main reason for my dissatisfaction? 1) Memory consumption, 2) CPU utilization.
Microsoft gets a lot of flak for writing bloated software, but Firefox is the biggest consumer of memory on my system. A distant second is Outlook. It is not uncommon for Firefox to consume 500MB-700MB (Private Working Set) on my T60p (2GB) system. I may only have 4 or 5 Firefox windows open with 4 or 5 tabs open each, but Firefox will get so slow and unresponsive that I have to kill it. Fortunately, the “Restore Session” feature lets me restore my windows, but it won’t be too long before the memory usage goes back up and the CPU starts spiking.
Maybe I could blame this on my specific laptop, but I’ve had the exact same problems for a while now even on previous laptops. There has been quite a bit of press on the Firefox memory leaks and I know the Firefox team is working on it, but I just can’t deal with it anymore. Since much of my day is spent staring into a browser, I’d rather sacrifice a little usability (IE) than to sacrifice on performance (Firefox). Perhaps I’ll try it again after the next major release.
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I still like Firefox a lot. I can’t deal with the IE slowness (or perceived slowness as felt by the user).
I typically keep one Firefox window open, with typically half a dozen tabs at a time. No issues…
I’ve been noticing the same thing on windows. I’m starting to think its the session manager extension I’m using though. I recently removed a few extensions from my config and things picked up remarkably.
Rob, your clearly now *need* 4 Gb RAM on your machine.
Yoav,
Have you had that experience with IE7? I’ve found it to be just as fast as Firefox (and faster when Firefox starts to bog down). My main gripes are the UI. (the reload button and the load indicator being on each tab)
Russell,
I used to load up all sorts of extensions, but stopped after having memory issues a couple of years ago. I have a pretty barebones Firefox install.
Phil,
And I thought a measley 2GB would do the job! ;-)
I think I found the problem. A great big finger wag at Adobe on this one. I installed the Flashblock extension that prevents flash plugins from running automatically. Its pretty slick since it just puts a placeholder where ever flash is embeded in the page for you to click on if you actually want it to play. Its really amazing how much faster things are now and just how many pages have flash all over them. Why do people use flash to show me a static banner add… I don’t want to think about it. The answer would probably be too disturbing.
I’m running vista with 60 tabs open in firefox at the moment. No problems what so ever… (and my laptop was only $650 w/ 3GB ram)
If you really desire speed, use Safari.