Mozilla's "phoenix" legacy is alive and well. I have been very skeptical of Mozilla even very recently as Firefox's many performance problems seemed insurmountable. But here I am after many years of using Chrome typing in this box using Firefox. I also hope they don't change direction. They're on fire and rising once again.

Agreed. I've noticed some rather nice performance improvements over the last six months, and, like you, I've switched back to FF from Chrome.

I'm guessing the computer you're running FF on has a solid-state drive; amiright ?

added: my reason for asking is that I run FF (release update channel) and I genuinely wonder whether it would be more responsive if it weren't for my slow hard drive. (in particular, I am hypothesizing that every time I visit a new page, its URL gets committed to disk.) was not trying to slam FF; please don't downvote me!

No, I'm not, actually. Just your standard, Dell-issued laptop drive.

I noticed better memory usage and general performance increases within the last few releases to the beta channel (sorry, I can't pinpoint which one it was). I started to use FF again a few months ago, and found I still needed to restart the browser at least once a day to keep things responsive (and I don't usually have more than a dozen tabs open). Then, after one of the updates, I didn't need to do that, and I didn't notice any performance degradation over the course of several days.

Thanks. I'll try the beta channel.

It's more than performance, they've also picked up must have features like opening up just closed tabs (cmd+shift+t), and cmd+9 to go to last tab, private windows (used to be all of firefox went private), quick updates.

Reopening a closed tab via Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+T has been a longtime feature of Firefox, since at least early 2007.

Oh, whoops. Thanks for correcting me!

The "Recently Closed Tabs" menu item (under "History") has been in FF since version 11 or before.

A few hours after I wrote this, my FF updated itself (to version 20.0) and became much, much more responsive!

Tr changing some disk-related settings in about:config.

Indeed, if it weren't for my startup, Mozilla is the first place I would want to work. I've been nodding in assent with nearly all their newer initiatives -- FirefoxOS, Persona, Rust, etc. Mozilla is pushing the Internet forward in the all the right ways.

My thoughts when seeing this exactly.. "please don't change" - unless it's for the even better of course :)