Goodbye Firefox. It was nice knowing you.

I've finally given up on Firefox. It was a great browser for its time, but it has become unusable for me. Don't get me wrong, I would still love to use it, but it has become too cumbersome.

First a little background. This all takes place on my laptop, which has a mobile version of the i7 processor and 4GB of RAM; neither of which should be scoffed at. Plus, I am running the latest and greatest version of Firefox. Even with all that powerhouse, Firefox has been *pull my hair out* frustrating lately.

This problem has been going on for a weeks now, but today was my final breaking point. Firefox has been running for a few/many days. I'm not exactly sure how long - probably over a week. Regardless, I had over 30 tabs open. Every now and then - especially when closing or switching tabs - the browser would hang for around a minute. Really!? Closing a tab takes a minute? That can't be right. I have a freakin' i7 processor and oodles of RAM.

I checked Task Scheduler and Process Explorer. Nothing was taking up any significant amount of processor. Even Firefox was in single digits - as it should be with an i7 processor. Ok. Well, first thing, plugins. I disabled all but what I would consider essential plugins (I actually did this last week, but I wanted to see how it went before I made a rash judgement). The ones I kept are Adobe Acrobat, DivX, Quicktime, Flash, Silverlight and Adblock Plus. All well known and fairly stable plugins. Nothing wacky.

Disabling plugins had no effect. At least nothing I could notice. Ok. Maybe it's still one of the plugins. Checked Task Scheduler and Process Explorer and killed all the plugin-container.exe processes I could find. Still no effect. In some of these cases, there weren't even any plugin-container.exe processes running. This leaves one major thing that I can think of. Mozilla needs to learn an age old lesson for large applications. Shared memory is bad - meaning you absolutely have to have some sort of separation or isolation between components (Now this doesn't go for every application, but browsers definitely fit this bill). Linux learned the lesson ages and ages ago by saying "don't create monolithic applications". Intel, Microsoft, and Google learned this lesson. When will Mozilla?  Well, as I just found out, they are; but it's a long way from being done. (Plus, I'm already half way through with my rant. Why stop now?)

Browsers really are the becoming the end-all-be-all of applications. While browsers don't actually do everything, they do provide a gateway for anything to be done. Kind of like what having a modem was back in the 80's. If you had one, you had access to the amazing world of wasting time. Even if it was just AOL or Compuserve, you were "connected". The same goes for browsers. If you have one - a relatively modern one - you can do your banking, your shopping, talk face to face; you can even watch freakin' movies. You can do all that and more - even at the same time.  There's even a "programming" language built in.

Because they can dynamically do so much all at once, there is so much less room for error. If something goes wrong in one place, it shouldn't drag the system down with it. There's no reason for that. Firefox has released it's first set of features - OOPP (Out of Process Plugin) - that begins to deal with the problem.  This prevents 3rd party code from causing Firefox to crash, but that isn't far enough. Each tab should be its own process. This is my number one favorite feature of Chrome. Opening and closing tabs is nigh instantaneous. (Yes, I realize Chrome hides the window/tab and does the real shutdown behind the scenes, but it's a separate process and doesn't slow down the rest of the "application".)

Now, there is a down side to this.  A separate process potentially means longer start-up times, more processor time, more RAM and sharing data across tabs/processes has got to be a nightmare.  As a user, I don't really care about it. I just want the application to respond reasonably well, and Chrome's GUI does this better than any other browser out there. There's even a Firebug plugin for Chrome.  So, I may even give up on Firefox for dev purposes, excepting some QA test cases.

Now, as I found out about three-quarters of the way through my rant, Mozilla has the Electrolysis (or e10s) project under way; but it's a long way from being done.  When they finish, I'll reconsider switching back to Firefox; but until then, it's Chrome all the way.