I've recently switched back as well and I find that it's back to a much better experience. Firefox was horrible for a while, but I think the team have been doing an excellent job of optimising it.
My only annoyance is the development tools - Chrome still whips FF here - and they are still no where as good as Firebug, which continues to be the most required extension - but I believe work is being done there too.
I switched back to Firefox from Chrome earlier this year, and the experience has been very positive.
It performs well, feels snappy, the dev tools are on par with Chrome's and everything feels right.
The only negatives are that container tabs are still taking a bit of getting used to (why can't I have a 'Work' window in which all the new tabs are 'Work' tabs by default?) and the initial migration of passwords was a bit of a pain.
I begrudgingly left the FF community when it became far, far easier to debug and develop on Chrome. At that time Chrome was competing with Firebug, and it was clear that the Chrome team had far more resources to be able to make continual improvements to the development experience than Firebug made. So I switched for development, and for practical reasons all other usage followed.
I wonder if my story is similar to others. From what I've seen Firefox now looks as though it has much better tools in-built and so I could consider the switch back, but I'd love some input on that.
Also, things I develop obviously have to work on Chrome, so that's another impediment to me switching over entirely, which is a shame.
In my experience, it's spectacular. I've switched back from Chromium to Firefox. It feels snappier than Chrome, and the newer dev tools means I don't miss Firebug.
I went back to FF earlier this year. The factors were both technical (Firefox has drastically improved from a speed and memory standpoint) and "political" (I'm gradually withdrawing from Google services). I'm still more familiar with the Chrome dev tools, but the default FF ones are coming along nicely.
Initially, I installed a few extensions to make FF as Chrome-like as possible. I disabled them after a while, and I couldn't be happier.
I also switched back for similiar reasons. FF has really stepped up their memory management and patching IMO. Also, i went back because of plugins.
Say what you will about chrome, but tab plugins are king in firefox. Tree style tabs on the left hand side and tab grouping what really sank it for me. I even merged the the search box and address bar in FF to give me that chrome omnibar feeling.
I think the most important takeaway is this: FF is still competitive among technical people and so is chrome. There even might be room for IE. We as a community, would need to keep voting with our feet and we can make sure the "browser wars" never end.
I made the switch from FF to Chrome about a year and a half ago. Here's my two cents:
What sold me was better memory management and better (in general) CSS3 rendering. I normally work with two windows open, one that has all my cookies and stuff so I can do web searches, and another with a blank persona so I can do development. Having two instances of Chrome running vs. one instance of Chrome and Firefox running seemed to lead to less crashes.
Regarding the dev. speed of Firebug, the lead dev on Firebug went to lead up work on Chrome's Dev tools[0]
I still find Chrome's dev tools lacking and the interface hard to navigate. I also miss the plugin ecosystem that Firebug had (I could send xdebug messages straight into Firebug, which was amazing!)
I've used Firefox all my life because of Firebug. Then after a while it just got so slow that it was unusable and the experience became terrible. And then I switched to Chrome. I'm not fond of their developer tools as much. Not as good as Firebug. I guess I'll give FF another shot.
I switched back to Firefox recently as well after using Chrome for years. Mostly it was due to problems on Linux, like Flash not working. I also love the work Mozilla has been doing -- Rust, Servo, and asm.js in particular -- which seem to be very promising vis-à-vis future versions of their browser.
Well, now is as good a time as any to switch back to Firefox. They've managed to come out of a long stretch of mismanagement, technical debt and security issues to a much better place.
I had switched away from FF to use Chrome predominately a few years ago, for a mix of various reasons. Performance being a big one. But I've been thinking more about the whole browser monoculture issue, and the importance of Mozilla and Firefox for the Open Web in general lately, so about a week or two ago I started switching back to Firefox as my primary browser. So far, so good. Performance feels pretty snappy so far, and I haven't run across many rendering issues, and none that really matter.
All in all, I'd say that if you have been considering Firefox, now might be a good time to give it a shot.
This is all, BTW, in reference to the desktop version (Linux specifically) not mobile.
I've been tempted to go back to Firefox, but it's kind of hard. I put up with Firefox for a very long time before moving to Chrome, and it's hard for me to go back. Part of it is that I suffered with really pretty crappy performance for so long, that when I changed, Chrome was so clearly better that I felt like my trust in Firefox had been broken. Part of it is that I feel like I have a lot of things in Chrome (saved passwords, extensions, configurations). I've been running one Firefox browser for running another session, just to get back to getting familiar with it and see how it does.
Firefox performance does seem dramatically better in the last year since I tried it seriously. Maybe 18 months. I think the multiple processes rollout really helped.
So, it's an option in my pocket. But I'm hoping to find a workflow that changes my habits, rather than just enabling my old ones. :-)
It has become my browser for browsing, while FF has become my browser for dev (because of FireBug).
Once FireBug works in chrome, I suspect I'll switch over completely, can't imagine what would keep me on FF.
Similar boat here. I abandoned Firefox back in the day due to the memory and freezing problems, and general lack of responsiveness compared to Chrome. The difference in everyday use was massive here; we went from having a browser that could hardly handle having 3 tabs open while using a gigabyte of memory, to one that worked flawlessly and used a fraction of the resources. Firefox then put in a lot of effort fixing those issues. By this time though, Chrome's built-in DevTools was more robust for my tastes compared to Firebug or the horrific early versions of their built-in replacement. I had a good development setup, all the addons I needed, and a fast browser. I simply had little reason to switch back.
I did spend a brief period swapping back to Firefox for the sake of perceived privacy, but then they started bundling all sorts of third party bloatware and it was just too much. I'm not a superfan of the information I imagine Google collects from my using Chrome, but the browser itself is just too good to give up. Firefox now only gets opened to verify cross-browser functionality of frontend UIs I work on, and on rare occasions when I want to use a proxy in a browser without it being used system-wide.
I switched back to firefox about 6 months ago now. I'm using nightly, and the built in developer tools are good enough that I don't worry about using firebug anymore. I find the speed pretty good, faster than chrome for some things, slower for others. One area it does shine is implementation of es6 features, and syncing with my mobile firefox browsers.
I hear a lot of firefox hate, and while it certainly used to be true that it wasn't very good, it's no longer true.
I'm really happy to be using Firefox again. I had abandoned it in favor of Chrome around 2014 because of how sluggish it had been getting. They really got it together with the quantum update though in my opinion. It still gets outperformed by Chrome (especially in the javascript department), but it's not a big enough difference to be a deal breaker for me, and I like feeling like I'm doing my small part to help combat Chrome's growing monopoly.
Totally lost my passion for firefox. It's so clunky and slow now, and Chrome is just so fast & sexy. I used to use it solely because of FireBug, but now Chrome's Developer Tools are just as good, and in my opinion, better than FBug.
My only annoyance is the development tools - Chrome still whips FF here - and they are still no where as good as Firebug, which continues to be the most required extension - but I believe work is being done there too.
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