I was a Firefox user since the Phoenix/Firebird days, but I switched to Chrome about a year ago. On two separate occasions recently, I tried to switch back to Firefox for daily use. In both cases, I was back on Chrome within a week. Firefox has made great strides in memory usage, Javascript performance and overall UI polish, but on my hardware* and with my usage patterns, it absolutely CRAWLS compared to Chrome. I found myself restarting it almost daily to keep it responsive, and even on a fresh startup it wasn't as snappy as a fully-loaded (15-20 tabs open) and long-running Chrome.
I can honestly say that if performance wasn't an issue, I would prefer Firefox. I love the addons that are available, particularly NoScript, ABP and Vimperator. The Chrome equivalents are imperfect due to Chrome's extension model, and I miss the real things almost daily. However, I just can't go back to a browser that's slow and unresponsive. Maybe Firefox and Chrome are just making different trade-offs, and I happen to benefit more from Chrome's choices. I don't know. What I do know is that I can't tolerate my browser freezing up or taking 5 seconds to process clicks.
* - A fairly modest laptop with a 1.6ghz dual-core AMD APU, 6gb of RAM and an SSD. It's easily fast enough for everything else that I do, and Chrome flies on it. On my much beefier desktop, Firefox is usable, but still noticeably slower than Chrome.
That doesn't sound typical. Have you tried doing a Firefox reset? I've seen it make a large improvement to performance, especially with older Firefox profiles:
(In short: Go to "about:support" and click reset. It will prompt you before doing anything, and will rebuild your profile while preserving bookmarks/history/saved-forms/etc)
I can honestly say that if performance wasn't an issue, I would prefer Firefox. I love the addons that are available, particularly NoScript, ABP and Vimperator. The Chrome equivalents are imperfect due to Chrome's extension model, and I miss the real things almost daily. However, I just can't go back to a browser that's slow and unresponsive. Maybe Firefox and Chrome are just making different trade-offs, and I happen to benefit more from Chrome's choices. I don't know. What I do know is that I can't tolerate my browser freezing up or taking 5 seconds to process clicks.
* - A fairly modest laptop with a 1.6ghz dual-core AMD APU, 6gb of RAM and an SSD. It's easily fast enough for everything else that I do, and Chrome flies on it. On my much beefier desktop, Firefox is usable, but still noticeably slower than Chrome.