This is an interesting take, since it's so difference from my experience. There's definitely some difference in use cases that had a large impact - whether that's device memory, open tabs, or even choice of websites.
I didn't switch to Chrome when it first came out, but over the next couple of years I found Firefox frustratingly slow and crash-prone. When I cut over, everything was drastically faster and more reliable, plus the feature set (extensions, url completion, incognito for parallel sign-ins, and so on) was noticeably better. High memory usage was the only price, and Chrome surrenders that somewhat gracefully when it's needed.
I'm hoping to make the switch back. Chrome has become more frustrating as Google adds brand alignment, and moreover I simply don't like being siloed by a brand. But the usability gain was massive when I first switched, and I'm only making the move now because there's been a lot of good news out of Mozilla.
It really depends on the websites. Firefox has long been significantly faster than it was in the Firefox-1.x days, when it was the fastest browser. It's always been perfectly snappy and efficient for hackernews, craigslist, 10,000-line colored diffs in the cgit web frontend ... but popular web sites got many times slower. Chrome enabled web developers to do atrociously inefficient things and just not care.
Even today, Travis-CI really struggles in firefox, it's modern pleasing animations are just so atrociously coded. And remember when the Reason (facebook language) website was unveiled, it really killed firefox, because of some strange shadow effect applied to all letters or something ...
The web is a complex platform, so it's definitely not hard to wind up using some feature that performs well in one browser but poorly in another. I don't know that it necessarily reflects badly on any individual browser--software is complex and it's hard to determine what combinations of web features will wind up being widely used. I do think it's a shame when this happens because sites don't get tested in anything but Chrome. There's no excuse when large companies release webapps and don't test in multiple browsers.
i remember years back when people were installing Chrome simply because it had Adobe Flash built in and didn't require a system wide install anymore. For a while, that was the biggest reason my friends installed it. Then Flash started going away, and they were still using it, and wrapped up tightly in the Googleverse with Gmail and then Android.
That's very interesting. I wonder what the environmental difference was/is. I'd say I've had Firefox crash only a handful of times over the years, and in some cases that involved me doing very bad things in JavaScript.
I didn't switch to Chrome when it first came out, but over the next couple of years I found Firefox frustratingly slow and crash-prone. When I cut over, everything was drastically faster and more reliable, plus the feature set (extensions, url completion, incognito for parallel sign-ins, and so on) was noticeably better. High memory usage was the only price, and Chrome surrenders that somewhat gracefully when it's needed.
I'm hoping to make the switch back. Chrome has become more frustrating as Google adds brand alignment, and moreover I simply don't like being siloed by a brand. But the usability gain was massive when I first switched, and I'm only making the move now because there's been a lot of good news out of Mozilla.