The reason I use Firefox over Chrome is mostly down to memory usage with a large amount of tabs open. Chrome really starts chugging when you get over 40 tabs (and it's a pain to organise them too). It also has some really weird caching problems which you only seem to stumble upon if you're doing a lot of web development.

That's a bit ironic. I remember not so long ago I've heard many people who switched to Chrome were deeming Firefox "memory hungry". I haven't heard similar complaints about Chrome up until now.

Firefox improved quite a bit with the more recent rapid release cycle. And don't forget the "organise" part. Once you get beyond a certain amount of tabs in a window, the usual tabbed arangement shows its weakness -- and at this point, you probably need something like XUL to expand the GUI, what Chrome/Safari have to offer in this regard just doesn't seem to cut it.

TreeStyle Tabs is basically my #1 reason why I'm sticking with Firefox.

> TreeStyle Tabs is basically my #1 reason why I'm sticking with Firefox.

Tree Style Tabs is, of course, one of the greatest things ever to happen to Firefox. It's on the list immediately after FireBug.

These days, I have been switching over to xmonad (and other simple window managers). Instead of using tabs inside of a browser, I use windows for each page. Next, I have a global key binding (C-o) that brings up windows as I type out tags which I can set with C-j. This way, I don't need tabs anymore, and I don't need impossibly long lists. I can just type the thing I want. C-o mdn, done. C-o google, done. C-o gmail, done. C-o irssi, yep.

I am still trying to figure out if this is better than constantly seeing a list of open tabs.

That's a bit similar to the way I did it way back when Firefox came out. One of the early window managers that supported this, probably pwm. And it does work quite okay as a simple tab substitute for most applications.

For browsers, I would need some kind of hierarchy support, though. A bit harder to do in a window manager, but then you'd have it for all kinds of applications. Maybe even combine it with some additional exposed information -- so without support you manager your hierarchy yourself, but if there's an easy way to get a buffer list, the top-level would be from the wm, and the second level from that list.

I would need some kind of display for a browser, though. I'm fine with on-demand buffer lists in editors (and actually turn off sidebars when I use Sublime), but for my browsing habits I'm better off with a list that's always visible.

FWIW, you xmonad technique is easily emulated in Firefox. Try C-l mdn, etc. The awesome bar really is awesome. Not only does it search open tabs, but it also searches your history and titles and it learns.

It depends on the usage. Users have different habits.

Firefox's memory usage is a bit less predictable (and can get crazy, especially when you leave badly coded js websites open for days in a row) and there are more situations when you say to yourself "I'm leaking memory, I'd better restart", but Chrome memory usage grows faster when you open more tabs.

Plus, Chrome UI is less suited to many tabs: favicons stop appearing beyond around 30 tabs (for me, it's probably machine-dependent), and the omnibar doesn't give you a way to switch to already open tabs by default.

Plus, Chrome autoupdates aren't exactly optimized for low-end configs.

Chrome is great at releasing memory (since it often is just killing a process) and it does tend to use less memory with few tabs.

But even from Chrome's birth, Firefox was already using less memory with lots of tabs.

It's a mixed bag.

Firefox uses far less memory per tab, but still chugs down more memory with time. Chrome uses metric shit-tons of memory, but its multi-threading allows individually killing tabs (or just massacring them in bulk if necessary, which it is).

When memory's tight, Firefox seems to bog down as a whole, while Chrome gets boggy on individual pages (and you can kill/reload these as needed).

I find myself using both though I'll fairly routinely go through and kill off Chrome tabs, and periodically restart Firefox, to keep memory management reasonable.

Firefox's tab and state management is far superior to Chrome. Chrome plays better with some advanced sites (notably Google's own webpages, surprise, surprise).

I've seen Chrome claim up to 512MB ram per tab on several occasions when you keep it running for a while. Chrome could be enough to use my (old) system's 8GB of RAM.

Now I have a 32GB system so it's less of an issue, but Chrome is still seriously a memory hog.

It's a very common observation that Chrome can't handle more than a few 10s of tabs.

In comparison, I know several people who regularly have more than 500 tabs open in Firefox -- 1200 is the highest number I've heard, though not all of these were loaded at once thanks to Firefox's "Don't load tabs until selected" option.

500 open tabs? Good lord, I don't have that many bookmarks!

I'm really curious, why would one do that?

I've had a little over a hundred open at one point... I go browsing on HN and reddit a lot. I click on a bunch of different links to open in new tabs, and once the tabs start overflowing, I move them to different tab groups, and eventually and forget about them. Since I usually close my browser when I am done browsing and reopen it when I want to browse again, it does not make much of a difference in terms of snappiness.

I've heard several people say they keep lots of tabs open like you do and I'm curious why.

Personally, I find I never need more than ~10 for the task at hand. Also, if I ever DO have more than that open, the titles get too small to read and I start forgetting what I have. I either go flipping through all of them to find one, or I just give up and open a duplicate tab, making the problem worse.

Instead, if I want to look at something later, I usually tag it in Pinboard. Later, I can scroll down through a readable list of things I've recently bookmarked, or if I vaguely remember it, I can search by tags or text to find it.

Given this, I can't see a reason to have so many tabs open. Can you explain why you like to work that way?

It's honestly out of laziness. I mostly just keep opening tabs and can't be arsed to go back through them and decide which ones to keep.

I've tried using all manner of sites like Pinboard, but none of them work as I like. I want a one-click bookmark button where I don't have to tag anything. Maybe I should finally get around to building the bookmarking app I really want.

I'm trying Pocket for a similar reason. It adds a little icon by the bookmark icon. There's no tagging or anything required, the things I save go into a private queue 'in the cloud', and it even syncs to my phone.

I can't remember why I stopped using Pocket. I really need to write down reasons why I stop using software/libraries etc; there always comes a time when I need to justify it and I can never remember the reason :D

I use http://historio.us/ for that. One-click bookmarklet, all my links are indexed so I can full-text search for them later.

>> I want a one-click bookmark button where I don't have to tag anything.

Pinboard has several different bookmarklets you can use. One of them is a single-click one that tags the page as "read later".

I do use Instapaper for that.

With some one-click extension.

Up to 100 tabs.

Because I can do it without any slowness.

I'm one of the two Opera users.

I have an explanation as well: Big parts of my work consists of exploratory "research" (what is written, what is available?)

Reading up on one alternative often leads to multiple links which I can either read one an one, return from, figure out what is the next link, follow that, maybe recurse another level then step back etc. To me this is cumbersome.

Instead of keeping this tree in my head I can just ctrl-click any interesting link, ctrl-tab to the next tab when I'm finished with the current one and continue ctrl-clicking.

Finishing up I can even use the save tab set feature of pinboard to stash it all away under a nice label.

I think that is a little petty. While I may be a vivid Mozilla supporter (and user of Firefox!), I did too get the strange feel of it being a bit of a 'whining'. At least the title gave that impression.

But reading the entry, it is actually rather good reasoning for why Mozilla won't switch to WebKit. I am not sure WebKit-dev really needs more companies telling them what to do. Or fight over what to be done.

While others may disagree, I consider XUL a compelling advantage over the alternatives, because I can modify my browser to my liking, without writing my own browser from scratch.

I am not trying to be conservative, but I like the way Firefox does things. Yes, there are issues, it is hardly perfect (I use Chromium to watch Flash and use Java at home, because I fear Firefox's heavy memory footprint[1]).

And Firefox's desktop share has remained rather stable the past year, along with Chrome's share.[2]

[1] Although, in fairness, I do usually have over 100 tabs open. [2] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/02/intern...

I think you missed an important point.

OP is not arguing people should be using Firefox or other Mozilla products to "fight monoculture". OP is arguing that in order to deliver browsers (and other products) with compelling advantages in a way that advances Mozilla's mission, Mozilla needs to maintain their own rendering engine(s).

What good is having an independent rendering engine if essentially every other aspect of Firefox as of late has been a copy of how Chrome or Safari handles things?

I'm talking about stuff like getting rid of the traditional menu bar and status bar, hiding the protocol in the URL input field, support for SPDY, the new tab page, silent updates, the built-in PDF viewer of the upcoming Firefox 19, and forth.

Meanwhile, we've also seen them spinning their wheels with failed me-too initiatives like Firefox for Mobile and Firefox OS, rather than producing any true innovation.

Ever since Firefox 4, all that Mozilla has managed to deliver is the Chrome experience, but in a less-effective manner. It makes perfect sense why people are leaving Firefox for Chrome; they'll get a nearly identical UI in Chrome, but they'll get new features sooner, and with better performance.

Err... speaking as someone who has two Firefox OS Developer Devices in front of him right now, I can tell you that it is indeed very innovative. And so is Firefox for Android (specially when using the Aurora channel).

What you seem to be completely ignoring is the proposal of a WebAPI standard that allows web applications to access hardware and OS features and how this enables a vendor-neutral app ecosystem that doesn't have to answer to Apple or Google. This is way more important than hiding the protocol in the URL.

Firefox for Desktop, Firefox for Android and Firefox OS are a combination that will soon allow you to have the freedom of the web (aka cross-platform apps that doesn't require permission from your vendor to exist) on all your devices.

This is not only innovation but this is fighting for a web that belongs to the users and not an ecosystem where the user is the product being sold.

Have you ever considered why Firefox for Desktop appears to evolve in a slower pace than Chrome or Safari? Its because of standards. Mozilla works in the open, heck, you can have access to all the steps of production of a Firefox feature and Mozilla strives to make things standard in the W3C or whatever standard organization deals with that feature while Safari and Chrome will often implement things and not care about interoperability. They can do this because they are the spear point of two companies, named Apple and Google that have their own objectives. As companies, they need to differentiate from the competition and thus need to evolve fast. The choice of evolving fast and differentiating alone or working together in cooperation between companies and committees is this gap you see in browser evolution. I'd rather have standard W3C backed WebAPI and Firefox than WebKit features that do not work on Gecko and Trident and whatever engine launches in the future.

Different from you, I see Mozilla as really innovative because fighting for users and a free standard web is an innovation in these days of vendor lock-in and "I have this feature, you don't".

> Have you ever considered why Firefox for Desktop appears to evolve in a slower pace than Chrome or Safari? Its because of standards.

and here's me thinking it was because Firefox and Gecko consist of 20M lines completely unmaintainable, crufty C++!

It's about 6M lines last I checked, of C++ that's not too bad.

How many lines is WebKit? And how crufty or maintainable? ;)

>Err... speaking as someone who has two Firefox OS Developer Devices in front of him right now, I can tell you that it is indeed very innovative

How is a me-too ChromevOS clone innovative?

ChromeOS isn't remotely the same thing as Firefox OS. "We’re aiming at mobile/tablet devices rather than a notebook form factor. This is an early-stage project to expose all device capabilities such that infrastructure like phone dialers can be built with Web APIs, and not only “high level” apps like word processors and presentation software. We will of course be happy to work with the Chrome OS team on standards activities, and indeed to share source code where appropriate." https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G/FAQ

I use Firefox Nightly and the latest Chrome stable. You're just plain incorrect. The Firefox user experience is very different to Chrome. Sure there are similarities but it's ridiculous to claim it's just a copy. They've taken a completely different approach to their built-in PDF viewer and as a developer I can tell you there's a huge number of differences in the way that FF and Chrome handle networking and interface standards. And, yes, these are noticeable to my non-developer friends and family.

The reason so many non-techies are using Chrome is that Google has a much stronger brand presence than Mozilla and has, at least in the UK, spent a fortune on advertising.

I love both of these browsers for different reasons. Please don't claim they're the same just for the sake of making a point.

> as a developer I can tell you there's a huge number of differences in the way that FF and Chrome handle networking and interface standards

could you explain what these changes are and how they're noticeable to the general public?

I'm a developer who's written a Comet webapp you've likely used or at least seen, and I have yet to notice...

The big difference is that although Firefox is abiding by convention, all of these things are pretty easy to configure. I show my status bar, full protocol in the location bar, and so on. I can refresh with F5 or Command-R, things like that. I don't know how many times I've had to use Chrome and been frustrated with something as simple as F5 not working.

Observing the activity on interesting support tickets, I believe that Firefox designers/developers have generally been far more responsive to user requests than have the Chrome designers/developers.

I think those are the two reasons why Firefox is so important: It is a true community project, and it is a browser suitable for power users.

Yes you're right but what is also striking (at least to me) is that they seem not very confident with their choice to sticking with Gecko and as far as I can remember it dates back to the launch of Chrome and its new threading model. I don't say they have done a bad choice (I'm still using FF as my main browser) but they seem to doubt about themselves, that's not really reassuring.

Believe me, Brendan Eich has zero doubt about the value of sticking with Gecko. With this blog post he's just pre-emptively answering the zillion people saying "Opera switched to Webkit, why doesn't Mozilla as well?"

I'm pretty sure you're wrong about that. The last time we had a corporate controlled monoculture there really was little practical reason to switch away from Microsoft to Mozilla except the idealism of fighting against corporate control, in fact, there were plenty of practical reasons not to switch since a big chunk of the web at the time worked only on IE browsers. But significant people did switch, enough to make a difference.

I use Firefox because it is free software. It feels more honest than Chrome, IE or Opera.

I keep Firefox up-to-date because it's the only web browser on Linux that appears to support the PKCS#11/Client-SSL/CoolKey/etc. needed to support using smartcards for SSL-enabled authentication on websites.

Is Firefox more free than Chromium?

Some parts of Chromium lack a free license[1], but is is a lot more free than Chrome.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_%28web_browser%29#Lice...

Then I suggest you read the article as he gives a very good explanation.

He gives a lot of political reasons for that, and I agree fully with them, but in the end the only thing that matters is the resulting product. Don't get me wrong, I am very thankful for what Mozilla did for the web at a time when IE was practically the only browser. And I also see that they continue innovate.

Mozilla can only survive if a sizable percentage of end users perceive Firefox as the best browser for them, and this usually means that Firefox needs to provide the best user experience. Personally I think that other browsers currently provide a better user experience, and I see a lot of people around me switching from FF to Chrome. The reason for that is not Webkit , but Firefox's user interface.

Funny, this is the same argumentation I see on open vs commercial software.

In the end only the product matters.

I don't think fighting a monoculture is a bad thing. Monoculture is bad in the long run, there are several implications to it mostly security wise.

So its not just monoculture. It's also Mozilla's wast ecosystem of customization and the good will it's projects generate.

Look at it this way - Did Chrome made/sponsor PDF reader in JS? Did it sponsor a Flash VM in JS? Did Google Chrome team made tools other than would help all vendors equally? Dart and NaCl are valiant efforts but they help Chrome first and other browsers second.

>I don't think fighting a monoculture is a bad thing.

he didn't imply it was bad, just that no one in this environment is going to switch to or stick with Firefox just to fight monoculture.