I switched because CPU usage on Mac OS was so much higher under Firefox than Chrome. I tried so many different things, following suggestions in Bugzilla, HN comments and just about every site I could find through DDG and Google. Nothing worked, and usually when I bring it up people dismiss the complaint with "it's better than it used to be", "it's not that bad" or "it's just you". But I'm not the only person complaining (or being dismissed outright).

To be clear, it's not pegging any core at 100% or anything so extreme. But it causes my laptop to heat up and my fans to kick in very frequently - something that almost never happens with Chromium/Webkit/Blink based browsers. If I primarily used a desktop, I wouldn't even have noticed, but a warm lap and constant fan noise makes it unusable for me.

Safari was out because I needed to run multiple browser profiles concurrently (something Firefox and Chrome support readily).

I've recently switched from Mac OS to Windows but my experience (as recently as a month ago) with Firefox leaves me feeling that it's the less mature implementation with an over zealous fan base ("it's not us, it's you!").

I flicked between multiple browsers at work since the Chrome news dropped. Having used Chrome for many years.

Firefox always had and still has an issue which can cause up to 2x page load times when used on Mac with scaled mode. Fascinating bug report but ultimately impossible to cope with at work!

I’ve actually landed up using Safari (I rarely use dev tools) and pleasantly surprised by it.

I never understood the appeal of Chrome over Firefox in the beginning.

It was faster, especially for JavaScript heavy sites... Which is the majority of sites these days it seems.

It took a couple years at least for FF to catch up. I would say for most sites Firefox is now at least as fast while using less RAM.

Now the problem is that Google web apps are tuned for Chrome, so users will complain their gmail is slow on FF.

> Now the problem is that Google web apps are tuned for Chrome, so users will complain their gmail is slow on FF.

I've heard this argument often, but it does not really resonate with me well. I've always used Gmail in Firefox and never noticed it being especially slow. I just tried it now and emails open seemingly instantly when I click on them. It feels quicker than ~100ms on average and certainly not slower than 200ms even for the occasional large email or hiccup. I just don't see how this can be used as a reasonable metric for choosing a browser.

> Not sure why power users ever left Firefox as their default browser when surveillance tech came along.

On any Firefox thread on HN, search for “macOS” and you’ll find several complaints. In my case, I could live with most of Firefox’s problems, but not the lack of AppleScript support.

I'm writing this from Firefox to test if it's still unusable on Mac. It's not that bad as before, to be honest. But for some reason now I can't synchronize it on Android... hopefully after another few years I will be finally able to switch over to it.