Not sure what's the issue for you; I've been using FF with its dev tools for years on Linux and Windows, and was always happy. Firebug had become way slower than the built-in dev tools, and Firefox is remarkably slower than Chrome, but not unstable at all (for me). And I like FF's dev tools better than Chrome's, except for performance investigation tools where Chrome is quite great.

hajile wrote: " I loaded up the latest dev edition a few days ago..."

I wonder if that meant the latest developer release, which would be expected to be unstable?

He is likely referring to: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/?v=a

This is a developer focused edition of FF and shouldn't be unstable.

Dev edition is Aurora, which is basically alpha (more unstable than beta).

So you get new features more rapidly, and a lot of the feature flags are flipped on, without needing to use something as unstable as nightly.

The lack of xpath support is an issue to me. Why doesn't FF have xpath support? Chrome and Firebug have/had this.

You mean this https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=987877 ?

You might want to leave a comment on how/why (use case) you used it to help to priorize the bug.

There's a Firebug Gaps meta bug which depends on this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=991806

Same experience for me. I have FF installed on my laptop as a second/backup browser. I use it once every few days. First time after I installed it I have got a notification that it is launching slow and I should consider removing add-ons. This was the first time I ever launched it. It constantly freezes and makes my laptop look like an oldie, even when it's not.

Chrome for me any day. I prefer to have ram clogged and no freezes.

Is this a recent version of Firefox? Are you using the embedded dev tools, or are you trying to use Firebug?

Chances are your issue comes from a buggy plugin. I've filled my share of Firefox bug reports, but lately most problems I run into are due to buggy plugins.