You Should Really Try The New Version Of Firefox
Update: The latest version of Chrome introduced a change that has privacy-conscious users up in arms: automatically logging you into the browser itself when you log into a Google service like Gmail:
Which means it's as good a time as any to consider switching browsers and take a bite out of Chromes ~60% market share. Last year we took a look at Firefox's updated Quantum browser. It's now up to version 62, but our recommendation that you give it a try remains the same.
Previously: Firefox has always been the younger, hipper, but never-quite-as-good younger brother in the browser wars. In recent years, it's lagged further and further behind the competition and has seen its market share drop to about 6% of internet users (which is, to be fair, nothing to sniff at). But that might change with the release of Firefox 57.0, aka Firefox Quantum, which may just have what it takes to take on Chrome.
The trouble with Chrome is that it's a resource hog. Go ahead — if your computer seems slow, open up your activity monitor and more likely than not, Chrome will be the culprit. Mozilla says they've totally rebuilt Firefox for the Quantum update with speed (2 times faster than the previous Firefox, according to Mozilla) and resource-friendliness prioritized first and foremost:
We made many, many performance improvements in the browser's core and shipped a new CSS engine, Stylo, that takes better advantage of today's hardware
with multiple cores that are optimized for low power consumption. We've
also improved Firefox so that the tab you're on gets prioritized over
all others, making better use of your valuable system resources.
[Mozilla]
RAM Usage
In our early tests, Quantum does appear to be a significantly lighter than Chrome. On my 2015 Macbook Air, I tried opening the same 9 tabs in Chrome and Firefox (Gmail, a YouTube video, Reddit, a Mashable article, a Verge article, a post editor in the Digg CMS, Chartbeat, ESPN, and Google Docs) — compared to Firefox, Chrome used 3 times as many processes (15, compared to 5) and almost 40% more RAM (~1800 MB, compared to ~1300 MB):
Firefox Quantum reportedly sees similar improvements over Chrome on Windows:
According to the [Mozilla's] numbers,
the latest build users 30-percent less memory than the competition when
running on a Windows System.
As you open more tabs in Quantum, it takes up less memory
than opening up multiple tabs in Chrome. On my Asus laptop with an
Intel Core i5, it runs six processes for 20 open tabs, while Google
Chrome runs 21 processes for 14 tabs. Note that after opening the 10th
tab, Quantum begins to show a squiggly loading sign on new tabs.
Speed
In addition to hogging less RAM, Quantum is just as fast or faster than Chrome in many cases:
Firefox Quantum is the first web browser that actively taps into the power of your computer's multi-core processor. Most browsers, like Chrome, aren't coded with attention to multi-core chips. Given the speed of modern multi-core processors, that's not much of a hindrance — but it is a hindrance. There's unused power lying idle. Firefox Quantum aims to tap into those extra cores by putting them to work. This smart resource allocation means Firefox Quantum is technically the quickest browser on the market, depending on your benchmark.
On the Speedometer benchmark, the pre-Quantum Firefox release scored 45, compared with 70 for Firefox Quantum. JetStream is one of the most thorough JavaScript benchmarks around, incorporating tests from Google's Octane and the WebKit Sunspider benchmark. Firefox Quantum scored 151 on JetStream compared with 144 for Google Chrome.
[PC Mag]
TL;DR
We will say that if you use a lot of extensions — particularly any unofficial extensions that aren't in the Firefox add-on store — you might find the transition to Quantum to be a bit frustrating, as it doesn't yet play nice with many extensions.
And if you try to switch and discover you can't live without Chrome's, uh, Chrome-ness, we'd still highly suggest you try out Opera, which looks and feels pretty much exactly the same and, like Firefox, hogs fewer resources.
Basically: Stop using Chrome, at least until Google realizes they need to make it better and faster to stop losing users.