If you’re still on the fence about switching to Firefox….
Disclosure: I’m a software tester, so while my results aren’t professional-grade as I’m not doing this in a scrubbed environment with formal testing tools, I do use the same methods, just without writing dozens of multiple-step tests and screnshotting every page.
I just changed back to Firefox as my primary browser a few months ago after getting frustrated with Chrome killing my resources and losing my pinned tabs. My laptop is a Dell XPS 15 9575, only two years old, and has 16 GB of RAM. Up to half of that would be used by Chrome, and it would spike my CPU at random intervals, causing slowdowns. Even stripping extensions didn’t help; I ran it bare just to see what would happen, and though it took a little longer to do it, it would still eat my resources at an alarming rate until I restarted the browser and sometimes, restarted my laptop.
Firefox uses AT MOST half the resources Chrome did; I mean this literally. I tested this on Windows and in Xubuntu using five pinned tabs + a.) five tabs, b.) ten tabs, and c.) twenty tabs when I did the changeover, just to see if I was imagining it.
Right now, Firefox is using 1.5 GB of RAM for ten tabs, eight pinned, five of those pinned for at least five months, and ten extensions, including XKit, AdBlocker, and NoScript. The only time I have to restart Firefox is when there’s an update. Casual checks of RAM usage I’ve never seen above 2 GB (at most), and the ‘casual’ part is important here; the only reason I check is if I remember to do it, whereas with Chrome, I was doing it every time my entire laptop slowed down which was several times a week.
Chrome, if it didn’t crash, I had to restart weekly at minimum and around the time I switched to Firefox, every three days . Again, this is on Windows and confirmed in Xubuntu.
Firefox also never loses your pinned tabs. Chrome couldn’t manage to keep my pinned tabs for more than a week; I had to have an extra extension just to restore them.
To give perspective on what an asshole Chrome is:
My work laptop is a brand new Dell Precision laptop we got when we went to work at home in March. Everyone in IT got the same one–cheaper in bulk?–so we all received workstations that assume we’re going to be creating, updating, and querying multiple tables in supermassive Oracle databases, creating and sandboxing multiple dev, SIT, UAT, and prod environments, stress testing both our individual programs and all of them working together to see if we can crash the network, and compiling shit on the side.
(As a tester, I get the joy of having to be able to do all of that because I never know what I’ll be testing next.)
It has sixty-four GB of RAM; when I got it, I almost cried. I buy stupid expensive laptops for myself and this is like, three to five times better than mine (and almost three times the price of my most expensive laptop, a new Alienware 17 R2 I bought five years ago). The stress test I did on it when I got it almost made me cry; it was beautiful.
Now, Precision on Chrome:
For browser agnostic testing of one of our native IE programs, we have to test in Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, and right now, we’re in Chrome. We’re prepping for a redesign from a literal web 1.0 interface with multiple inline frames and javascript hell that was designed for fucking IE 6 (yeah), so in the meantime, we’re testing polyfills to translate IE to Other Browser. It’s going great, thanks.
Chrome has minimal extensions as required by the state, and four pinned tabs; one my gmail, the other three work related: one for JIRA, one for JAMA, and one for our case creation tool. None of these are high-resource programs; JIRA and JAMA are for story and task tracking and linking. Testing is opening a page on the network that’s a basic page with ten HTML/Javascript elements from the program with the polyfills to make it work in Chrome. Not even the whole program here: just tiny HTML/Javascript elements that we click a button (or ten) and get a code-y equivalent of a ‘success’ or ‘fail’ message.
If I leave Chrome open for more than three days without a browser restart or laptop restart, it slows down a new Precision laptop to a crawl. When I’m not using Chrome for testing but just for story and task tracking in JIRA and JAMA? I get a week.
Just saying: Chrome is fucking evil.
