Same here, but for a slightly different reason for me:
When you're not logged into your google account, typing into the address bar with periodically kill chrome on mountain lion.
Not often, but maybe 3 or 4 times a day. Not kill the tab; hard kill chrome, instantly, destroying all the tabs, no recovery, all chrome processes go poof. It happens on all three of my mac devices (and this is on Version 25.0.1364.160).
It's not even a choice; that's just unusable.
I've also found firefox to be a lot better than I remember. Firebug is still a memory hog though, and as we saw in the other epic thread, the firebug / native developer tools thing is still just idiotic.
...but it's pretty good.
I honestly didn't expect to be ever returning to firefox because it was more stable than the alternative.
That's pretty much my experience, with one additional issue that really keeps me coming back to Firefox: Chrome doesn't handle sleep and wake-up well.
Ironically, one of the applications that suffers most from this is Google Apps. I'll have calendar, gmail and half a dozen spreadsheets and documents open, move to another room, re-open the Macbook and Chrome dies on all the tabs. Firefox has no problem with this.
I found it's lack of support for native functionality in MacOS too irritating (eg doesn't support system wide autocomplete - so my @@ shortcut that puts my email address in doesn't work in FF - I know I could put it in again in FF but it's annoying it just doesn't work) so I went back to Chrome in the end.
I was using Edge for a while but the absolute car crash their UI has become - and can't be configured - sent me running screaming for the hills.
Edit - and don't get me started on the massive slowdowns once I have more than a handful of tabs open.
As a developer, I've gone back and forth over the years. I just switched back to Firefox I think for good though. Chrome crashes consistently now and having Gmail and google music open at the same time is a total resource hog. I was even using the Canary version and that was hardly ever stable.
I've also come to favor firebug over chrome's dev tools.
I could've written this myself. I love Firefox and I used it for years but at some point it became rather unusable and after it forgot which tabs I had pinned as app tabs for the fifth or so time (because I had to kill a completely unresponsive Firefox, this happened often) I was angry enough to actually give Chrome a try. It is SO much more responsive, even just the UI. I've kept Firefox up-to-date but I don't want to keep switching back and forth so I haven't made a switch back. I hope I'll get to, though.
This is all on a Windows 7 machine though, rather than OSX.
Strange. I've been using Firefox on macOS for the last 10 years and it's still working well for me, including to access Google services.
Tabs work very well in Firefox for me. I have 17083 tabs open at the moment, on my 2013 Macbook Pro, still going strong.
The Containers are great for separation of concerns and for multiple accounts like work vs personal, business shopping vs personal shopping, etc.
I tried Safari for a while but switched back to Firefox. I use Ungoogled Chromium occasionally to generate PDF invoices and have used it for a better Google Hangouts experience, but otherwise rarely open it
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.
Me too. I'm using FF since 3.6, and before that Camino (a derived version for the mac), and the only thing Google has done is strengthen my resolve to keep using Firefox, but I still prefer to debug on Chrome (well, Chromium). It just feels better, even though it's starting to slip and FF is improving slowly.
I have some harsh news for you. I did exactly that. I moved back to firefox after probably 3 years on chrome. It's not much better.
There's one thing about chrome that has spoiled me. The fact that when something crashes only the tab or tabs crash. After the third time firefox crashes and the whole browser locks up you go back, like me. Also chrome's task manager is magnificent.
The one thing I dislike about Chrome is that I still find it buggy at times on my mac. Buggy in strange ways and especially with the inspector/debugger. That being said, I still use it as my main browser. Going back to FF annoys me when there are two input boxes (address bar and search) and that the tabs don't close under each other (for really convenient tab closing). Other than that I'm sort of indifferent.
Firefox really needs to get it together. I use Chrome for work, Firefox for my personal gmail, and Safari for battery-conscious use.
Firefox is the browser I have to restart the most frequently, because otherwise it slows to a crawl, or hogs so much memory (Despite only having 1-2 open tabs) that I'm constantly paging on my MBP with 16GB of ram.
There's also little UI quirks, such as not being able to natively look up a word in OSX dictionary, that make browsing less pleasant.
As others mentioned, my experience is the opposite. I'm on Mac, and I forced myself to ditch Chrome due to privacy concerns and, honestly, I don't miss it at all.
Occasionally, I have to fire it up to test something for work, or if a site doesn't support Firefox (it's 2022 devs, come on). And, each time it reminds me of why I prefer Firefox. It seems so bulky in comparison, and everything seems to slowdown with it open, where Firefox just happily stays open in the background, w/multiple windows and tabs and rarely causes any issues.
Give it a shot again if it's been awhile, it's great.
I switched to Chrome around that time too, for many of the same reasons (mainly performance and stability).
I've since switched back because Chrome is a terrible memory hog and I can have tons of tabs open on Firefox with no impact on performance (as long as I don't actually load them), and I don't have problems with crashing the way I used to.
I ditched Firefox for Camino three years ago and then upgraded to Chrome when I got a new MBP two months ago. I'll never switch back from Chrome.
Firefox on the Mac is brutally slow at times for me and the interface doesn't look nearly as nice as Chrome. I like software that gets outta my way and lets me work effectively. The developer tools in Chrome are way better than Firebug IMO anyway so no hangup for me there.
I use both. (Especially since Google started only allowing you to login to one gmail session at once, but I used both before that.) Currently there are about three things that keep me from using Chrome entirely, because I do think it's a better overall browser but not better for my particular use case.
The first is lack of the Tree Style Tabs extension (in general lack of extensions was my biggest problem with Chrome until recently; now they have NoScript and AdBlock and ctrl+shift+j is about as good as FireBug which were the deal-breakers for me before), the second is not eating up huge amounts of memory if I have 593 tabs loaded into it (which is currently what I have on this Firefox), the third is I don't like their URL box. Firefox's AwesomeBar is almost perfect, I just wish it had better coverage of my history+favorites (I'm sure there's an about:config option somewhere that tunes it).
Same here, but I still can't get away with NOT using Firefox but only due to Firebug. I just can't get to grips with chrome's dev tools, but it may be a habit thing. And Firebug for Chrome is just "Lite" really.
I still use Chrome on my OSX MBA, but on my Ubuntu desktop I switched back to firefox because I found Chrome to be buggy. Also, the flashplayer implementation on Chrome is terrible.
Same, I had it as my default browser for a few weeks and it was a huge improvement, but ultimately I had to switch back to Chrome.
No default zoom or pinch-to-zoom were my biggest pain points, then performance (mostly comparable with Chrome, except videos consistently spike the CPU above 100%), and the last straw was the ridiculous number of OS X kernel panics I was getting. Beyond that, a lot of little enhancements would make a huge difference, like support for pasting without formatting, support for whatever clipboard APIs Google Docs needs, U2F support, and top-level await in the console.
I generally love the new Firefox and got my configuration in a state where I was sad to leave the UI/UX for Chrome's, but there were too many downsides to the point where it was becoming an obstacle to doing my job. Really hoping these issues can all be sorted out relatively soon.
When you're not logged into your google account, typing into the address bar with periodically kill chrome on mountain lion.
Not often, but maybe 3 or 4 times a day. Not kill the tab; hard kill chrome, instantly, destroying all the tabs, no recovery, all chrome processes go poof. It happens on all three of my mac devices (and this is on Version 25.0.1364.160).
It's not even a choice; that's just unusable.
I've also found firefox to be a lot better than I remember. Firebug is still a memory hog though, and as we saw in the other epic thread, the firebug / native developer tools thing is still just idiotic.
...but it's pretty good.
I honestly didn't expect to be ever returning to firefox because it was more stable than the alternative.
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