I don't want to sound like a rant but that's the reality for me.<p>TL;DR Been using Firefox as my main browser since 2005. Refused to move to Chrome when a lot of people did. As of today both my home and work machines default to Chrome. So what happened?<p>Earlier this year the problem started on my personal laptop. I'm based in UK and Firefox suddenly decided it will start searching in google.com rather than google.co.uk. I made sure my Google preferences say UK, my PC location is set to UK, reinstalled Firefox, nothing. IE and Chrome still search in google.co.uk. After a month of struggling I gave up and switched to Chrome.<p>I kept Firefox as my brain browser on my work PC. It was still searching in google.co.uk so all good. All good until like 2 weeks ago when opening a Google Hangout in Firefox started resulting in the browser taking up to 900Mb of RAM with 3 tabs opened (gmail, hangouts, website) and crashing. We use Google Apps at work so I spend a lot of time in hangouts... Again I struggled for 2 weeks and gave up. As of today Chrome is my default browser on all PCs.<p>What went wrong with Firefox really? I could easily blame my PC setup but I don't think so. 2 very different issues on 2 machines, yet other browsers still function normally on both of them.<p>I'm even considering the ridiculous probability of Google subtly screwing with Firefox users on random bases just to get them unnerved and switch to Chrome.<p>Is anyone else experiencing such a degradation of their Firefox experience?
Both things you mention have to do with Google, who happens to own Chrome. Why do you think it is a ridiculous proposition? After all, you gave in and switched to Chrome...<p>I've actually done the opposite, switched back to Firefox after many years of using Chrome. Was a bit wary, but no issues at all, runs fine in both PC and Mac. Although I don't use hangouts on it.
We call this "begging the question".<p>You have decided Firefox is broken. I have zero complaints about it, it is my default browser on Android, Windows and OpenBSD, all three of which I use daily without issue.
I've been using Firefox on Linux for quite some time. My default search engine is DuckDuckGo. I haven't had any problems with Firefox.<p>My wife uses Firefox on Windows 7 (she hated Windows 8, so we switched back to Windows 7) and she had been having some problems with Firefox (can't connect after auto-upgrade, Firefox using lots of CPU resources, etc). I finally figured out the connection problems (it was our Norton firewall needing to be told about the Firefox update), and doing a Firefox refresh (<a href="https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings" rel="nofollow">https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...</a>) seems to have solved the excess CPU usage problems.
I'm a bit in the same boat.<p>Firefox is better than before for me : it crashes less, less memory leak with better cleaning.<p>BUT I still have to restart it regularly. At some point during the day it becomes less responsive, closing a tab freeze the browser (during which Windows task manager indicates that FF uses 25% of the cpu for xx seconds, may be related to my quad core), etc.<p>I don't even have that much tabs (like 2/3 windows, ~20/30 tabs).<p>The worst offenders are GMail, Google Images (or even Imgur, lots of images seem to kill FF) and a forum page full of Youtube videos.<p>Removing Adblock helped a bit but other than that I haven't find an extension I could blame (Classic Theme Restorer was a problem though, it's fixed now).
I have the same issue when it comes to the slowness. It crashes really easily, and takes up a lot of RAM. Chrome runs just fine with the same websites. Each time I switched to a new opened tab, it hangs, that is deeply annoying.<p>It might be better to open an issue on a forum/dev complaints board, but I feel like it is always the same answers. Do a reinstall/reset to factory settings or this kind of thing, which is not helpful as I have obviously done it.
Have you tried the below? It helped me.<p><a href="https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add-ons-and-settings" rel="nofollow">https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...</a>