Firefox vs Chrome - RAM use and noisy fan

I couldn't find a recent thread on this topic via search, apologies if I missed something.

I've switched between these two several times the last 15 years, mostly because one of them starts experiencing performance issues. Usually something like chugging RAM or CPU, and making my laptop fan go nuts.

Recently I've started experiencing this with Firefox. The RAM usage is way up and the fan starts spinning as soon as I open more than one-two tabs. I've checked out a few tweaks (I have two extensions installed, and tweaked hardware accelration from 8 to 6) but this doesn't seem to have much effect.

So I now wonder if it's time to do another switch back to Chrome? One of the reasons I'm asking is also because I have the impression Firefox is a bit safer with regards to personal data, but I'm not sure if that's true. I guess Google is monitoring my every move anyway.

 

FireFox is not safer, they have a lot of bloatware now, What's new, gift icon, top sites (they know what sites you visit most), and this is enabled by default, I don't trust Mozilla anymore:



I would rather Google track me and make my life easier in terms of search history, places I visit, etc than have some company track me just for the sake of telemetry.

Also, Chrome is much lighter, way faster in terms of loading websites, it stomps over Firefox in all aspects. This coming from a Firefox fanboy since v3 BTW

 

Thanks! That's pretty much all I need to know. I've always had a thing about Firefox, but I guess it's time to switch again. The for no obvious good reason RAM chugging is driving me nuts to be honest.

 

edge is very efficient. I use it and one of my systems are light on ram 4gb with no issues at all.

 

I've had a built in scepticism towards Microsoft browers for years now. Time to give it a try and ditch Chrome as well? Feels weird.

 

Ha ha. I really enjoy it, but hey....who am I?

 

Your FF what version was it when it was working? I seen upgrade of FF where it caused installed corruption but wasn't obvious til it was used and caused lags, memory leaks and just not working. So best is to uninstall all FireFox but if you have bookmarks read FF site how to saved them to restore them and then uninstall and delete any FireFox folder and reinstall to fix this problem.

 

I always felt Chrome was bloated and took more RAM than necessary than FF. On Windows, Edge Chromium sips less power and RAM than Chrome.
For Firefox, you need to un-check Recommend addons as you browse in General section. If someone is using Cloudflare DNS or NextDNS FF users can to General > Network Settings > DoH Cloudfare/NextDNS. Earlier, I was using Cloudflare but nowadays Google/CF ping rates are unusually higher than ISP DNS.

 

I think FF 82.x had some weird issue as well. @6730b noticed increased CPU clocks doing nothing.
I think 83.x solved it. Yesterday, I tried it on battery and earlier my fans would ramp up instantly to 100% like a jet momentarily and then goes passive. Also, if you have enabled Webrender or tweaked any prefs in about:config try reverting to defaults.

 

I just changed over to Chrome now. It definitely feels a lot smoother than Firefox. No fan noise so far either.

 

Edge is even better than chrome for thermal and battery management. Microsoft recently released a list of things they worked on to improve over chrome.

 

I've been using Firefox since it forked from the Netscape days, but recently it has been more trouble than it has been worth. I've found myself slowly, but surely, opening more pages in Edge for a much smoother experience all around. Mind you, this is on (yet another) clean install from scratch. I have my system(s) set up so I can nuke and be back up and running in less than 30 min. I do this routinely with new driver installs and such. The issues still present themselves.

 

At least Google is the devil you know vs the devil you don't.

Google is basically, "Hey, you know we're going to data mine the crap out of your online experiences but look at all these convenient free stuff!"

I can live with that.

 

I've had the opposite experience. Firefox has been consistently getting better and faster for me to the point where the difference is hardly noticeable in day-to-day usage. Part of it may be because I don't keep more than 10 tabs open at any one time. However, what is a problem, and the main reason why I switched to Firefox full-time is that Chromium-based browsers still cannot play 1080p/60 or 4K video without dropping frames.

 

FF doing fine here regarding memory and speed, but that network activity immediately at launch? Too much, what is Mozilla trying to do? see attach, no website, all ff telemetry disabled, addons not set for autoupdate etc (loopbacks are ff attempts blocked in firewall). f.ex. Vivaldi, very quiet in comparision.

 

I still use Firefox as my main browser. I've just run into little problems here and there that have caused me to have to use Edge to resolve them.


Here are a few:

One is PDF printing. Firefox is still hit or miss with alignments and they run off the page to the left. I end up opening them in Edge or using a stand alone exe
Certain secure sites getting caught in Captcha loops and / or failing to verify.
Third WAS when I had an AMD card, sporadic YT BSODs with hardware acceleration enabled. Since switching to Nvidia, zero crashes.
Lastly was poor integration with Ad Blocker Plus on various sites forcing me to completely disable it versus working fine on Edge.

 

me too. I also use Firefox as my main browser but running the ESR versions of FF, and not the normal ones that get updated about every 4 weeks. Firefox ESR just get major version updates once a year.

 

I had switched from Chrome to Opera and noticed significant improvement in performance and reduced RAM utilisation. Now I'm on Brave, on par with Opera in terms of performance, but seems to offer even better security against tech privacy invasion.

 

I'm still on F52.9ESR. (If it still works, why bother changing/upgrading?) That was the last one I think where I could tell it to not auto-update. Using it in combo with Edge. Scared to try the newer FF versions as I hear it's/they're become borderline spyware.

 

Wasn't Brave the browser that got in trouble for having a cryptominer embedded into it?

 

Not aware of that, but did find this:

https://decrypt.co/31522/crypto-brave-browser-redirect

Hmm, a bit shady, nothing remotely like mining though.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BATProject/comments/7pyl29/does_the_brave_browser_do_any_mining_on_the/

 

Shady or not... This should have never happened.

"It's not great, and sorry again. I'm sad about it, too," he wrote.

"We made a mistake, we're correcting: Brave default autocompletes verbatim ' http://binance.us' in address bar to add an affiliate code," wrote Eich.

Eich, Brave's CEO, apologized for the redirects and offered an explanation for the behavior, claiming it was a "mistake".

However, other Twitter users challenged the idea that Brave had simply made a mistake. Further research of Brave's GitHub repository revealed it was also redirecting the URLs of Ledger, Trezor and Coinbase to URLs that Brave profits from.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/best-internet-browser-2020-2021.832782/page-3#post-11021477

 

Sigh. Nowhere to run. I think I'm going back to Lynx.

What about Vivaldi? I've read it's not very fast.

 

Wow! That one is too unsafe.
You could try Waterfox Classic. Developer dropped balls on it few months ago and moved attention to fork based on newer versions of firefox but if you are on FF 5x ESR them you are already done with some sites not being supported.
Try simply copy pasting old FF profile into WF and rename accordingly, might work.

I myself struggle to accept that a thought of googling "How to install Edge Chromium on Windows 7" is itching in my head.

 

You can install Edge on Win 7 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/business/download
I can use same msi package on w7,w8.1 and w10 and even pre-install silently during OS slipstreaming.

 

I'm not really seeing a remarkable difference between Chrome and Edge Chromium. Chrome seems to use just a little more memory and has a couple of extra processes. The differences are too small for me to consider them important, but Chrome does look and feel a little more polished to me. I don't care for Bing much. I lean in favor of Chrome and Google features integration, but nothing remarkable stands out to me about either one. I think it really boils down to user preference and how much effort is needed to make the switch may have some bearing on the question of whether or not it is "worth it" to switch from one to another. I do not see either of them, or Brave, being something that I would categorize as a 'compelling' product. That's not a knock against any of them. I do not view any web browser as being a compelling product. I appreciate the convenience that Chrome offers me more than I do the other options. When it comes to rendering web pages, I really don't care which one as long as the web page loads correctly and swiftly.

 

Actually, turns out Brave is open source, so that's pretty good: https://github.com/brave
If one doesn't trust the official packaging, I guess they could build their own.

 

Valid points, but the touchpad scrolling on Edgium trumps every single browser for me. I really like a browser with good scrolling physics, it just makes the overall experience better.

 

That's an interesting term for the Chromium based Edge. I had never heard it before, but it makes perfect sense. (Yes, I Googled it, LOL.)

I am unable to speak to the superiority of touchpad scrolling since I primarily use my desktops and when I occasionally use my laptop the touchpad is disabled and I use a mouse. I usually will go out of my way to avoid using a touchpad in favor of a mouse, and only use it as a last resort.