Mozilla started increasing its paid staff about 1.5 year ago and it almost doubled. Most of those people are now well worked in. It would have been sad if there was no user visible improvement. (Of course, not all new hires went to desktop Firefox with critical projects like B2G starting etc)

Increasing the release schedule coincided pretty well with that in getting the new work out faster, too.

Unless I encounter memory leaks or similar problems the only time I open my browser is when I restart my computer, which is at most once a month.

I'm curious if this data exists. Is there data on how often people close / open their browser?

The site seems down, now, but that data was taken and helped shape the changes we're seeing now.

Old link: https://testpilot.mozillalabs.com/testcases/tab-open-close/a...

My FF opens pretty quickly by my standards. What seems to take forever is closing it. It seems to me that there ought to be some performance optimizations to be found in that area.

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/139e8e845aa5

Speed, for me, just has never been an issue.

Our application is not JavaScript heavy but it does contain a lot of HTML.

In the end though, both work fine and I don't mind the difference in speed too much.

So I tried Opera. It had a few quirks which ultimately threw me off too much. Hence, Firefox. It does not annoy me (much). That is all I ask from good software.

Also, Firefox syncing is quite amazing.

Divorcing myself from Google is still in progress though, with maps and calendar being the last holdouts.

The reason I switched was some niggling privacy concerns and then discovering that google-chrome won't allow Ghostery to block doubleclick.

Firefox with:

  adblock-plus, 
  ghostery, 
  noscript, 
  requestpolicy, 
  refcontrol and 
  cookiemonster 

  add to searchbar,
  customizable shortcuts,
  duplicate in tab context menu,
  firegestures,
  open link in ..., and 
  sessionmanager 

This is mostly a process of logging what the cycle collector is looking at, then trying to figure out if there are reasons why particular objects are always alive that we could take advantage of. The most common cases have been taken care of in Firefox 12 and 13, so we're left with a variety of little cases. This results in exciting bugs with names like "unmark gray objects held alive by nsXBLDocGlobalObject of skippable nsXBLDocumentInfo" ( https://bugzil.la/735550 ).

The bug grayrest linked to has a good list of them, as well as one of its subbugs ( https://bugzil.la/716598 ).

However, the big pain is the memory leaks caused by the addons (namely Firebug) which make the memory climb to 2 gigs after 4-5 hours of development. I guess they should be focusing on these issues too, since some of them are so popular, that users prefer FF thanks to them (like the aforementioned one).

Really? Except for OSX users that is. Still, improving startup time is a good thing.

You can turn this behaviour off as well. I'd like to see perhaps the option to turn it off on an individual site basis. Or perhaps set a default value of off for pinned tabs (I haven't tested, the behaviour of pinned tabs.)

Tabs/history/bookmarks I believe are the most pressing area for UI development in the browser.

A lot of this management could be pushed into the OS shell. If you could manage Windows easier - you wouldn't need tabs.

Tab behaviour is so inconsistent across browsers, apps and different OSs it hurts.