Chromium vs Firefox?

[Evan Huus]

On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 11:00 AM, John Moser <john.r.moser at gmail.com> wrote:
> This has not been my experience.  Flash seems to crash a lot in chromium,
> but it doesn't take it down.  I've had Chromium blow out completely once,
> and once I've had every single page in it turn to "Sad Browser."  But that
> was around Chromium 5.
>
> Firefox has been doing better, but it only seems to handle a Flash crash
> once or twice:  after the first crash, if you reload a page with Flash,
> Flash will likely crash AGAIN very quickly and tear down the whole browser.
> Firefox also tends to go down if you have too much crap going on, i.e. if
> you load a page that runs excessive scripts or brings in too many GIF
> images.  The whole UI will lag (Firefox 4 too), and often crash if it comes
> under too much load doing too many things (race conditions?).  I've never
> seen Firefox actually free memory by closing a tab.
>
> Chromium has been a lot faster and a lot more stable for me.  I use Firefox
> 4 at work and Chromium at home, and I'm constantly restarting Firefox after
> it crashes.  I switched to Firefox 3 for a time, it's more stable but still
> crashes--a lot less than 4, but 2-3 times a week.  Also, when one tab in
> Chromium is lagged down to the point of complete and total browser crawl,
> you can still switch to other tabs and use them like nothing is happening.
>
> So eh.  What's "unstable"?

I'm a fairly heavy firefox user on both ubuntu and windows, and I've
never seen anywhere near that level of crashing. It could be I'm just
lucky, but have you tried browsing for a while on a fresh,
extension-free profile?

As per the memory usage when closing a tab, that's by design. As long
as you have memory to spare, it won't free the tab immediately so that
it's fast to reopen via "Recently Used Tabs". I'm not necessarily sure
I agree with that decision, but it isn't a bug regardless.

Just my two cents,
Evan