Advertisement

Article

Five reasons to give up Firefox

Jonathan Riggall

Jonathan Riggall

  • Updated:

I’ve had a few good years with Firefox, but I disagree with Nick that we should stick with it. Progress never stops, and it’s become impossible to ignore how much Opera, Safari and especially Chrome have improved. It’s time to dump Firefox, and here’s why:

1: Memory usage

Sure, there are thousands of neat add-ons for Firefox, but install a few and after a while you’ll see its memory use rocket. I have often discovered Firefox eating a gigabyte of memory after a few hours at work, which is just unreasonable. I have found Opera and Google are much lighter on resources over a day in the office.

2: Looks

I know there is beauty on the inside, but why not have it outside too? When it comes to your browser, you don’t need to compromise with attractiveness. Firefox has been leapfrogged by everyone when it comes to looking great – even the dreaded Internet Explorer is looking better these days.

3: Out-dated features

Have you seen the downloader in Chrome? Firefox will just seem inadequate once you have. Firefox extensions? You have to restart the browser to install. Those are just two of the Mozilla browser’s out-of-date features. Try Opera if you want to see a truly modern feature set. What’s more, the Firefox interface takes up more room than is necessary – changing browser will give you more browsing real estate to play with.

4: Stability

Firefox crashes every day for me. I discovered that with Chrome, each tab is a separate process and so you can isolate and kill the problem without losing all of your open tabs. That’s much better, and minimizes your chances of losing work.

5: Familiarity isn’t good

A fact of computing is rapid change – don’t let comfortable familiarity keep you from moving with the times or you may find yourself too far behind to catch up.  Just because a feature works differently doesn’t mean it doesn’t work at all! Familiarity is what keeps IE 6 and 7 in the browser charts. Safari, Chrome and Opera all do things in their own ways, but they are all great browsers and you’re missing out if you don’t give them a chance!

Jonathan Riggall

Jonathan Riggall

Latest from Jonathan Riggall

Editorial Guidelines