That really doesn’t sound like normal behaviour? Have you tried the ‘Reset Firefox’ button on about:support? More info at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-preferences-fix-p...
currently using a netbook with an Atom N570. I appreciate under-powered computing. Firefox runs fine here with 5 extensions (two of which are for web development). 17 tabs are using 214.52 MB of memory. haven't had a crash or hang in a long time.
This is all on a Windows 7 machine though, rather than OSX.
The irony is what use to be its greatest flaw, memory usage/leaks, is now it's greatest strength. Around Chrome 15+ memory usage started ballooning and was too much for my 2GB netbook. A laggy UI is much better than an unresponsive system from thrashing RAM.
I've run into some strange behavior like this before too. When you reopen Firefox and its lost your session, try opening another window or two and see if 'Restore Previous Session' is finally available.
If that didn't work, there are also a few other tools that can help solve restoring your sessionstore.js:
Firefox Sessionstore.js fixer
http://thepanz.netsons.org/post/firefox-sessionstore-js-fixe...
What if Firefox loses your tabs ?
[0] https://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/ux-presentation/ux-pr...
Google+ is a great example - it slows to a crawl after a few minutes of browsing - it particularly becomes unusable when I scroll down and it loads more content via AJAX.
I'm on Xubuntu 13.04.
Apart from that, Chrome has very nice features that make life easier.
The PDF preview of Chrome is great. It can rival the PDF viewers on desktops easily. Heck, it helped once when I had to get a printout at a shop and they didn't have PDF Reader installed. I just dropped PDF onto Chrome and we had a PDF reader that could print. I know about PDF.js but it is not so good!
Next, the UI could be improved. Firefox has its upsides as well. I love the hidden status bar. I have dropped all my extension icons there. Now, with one shortcut, they are accessible and for normal browsing, don't come in between. But Chrome's way of managing extension icons is great, and one thing that particulary drives mad with FF is that there are no visible zoom controls. I have been using it on and off for a year now but I still don't know how to find if I'm zoomed in or not.
Chrome has really good Flash integration and I didn't know that I did not have Flash Player installed till I started using Firefox. What is stopping them from bundling a plugin like Chrome?
After using chrome and even safari, the UI feels so "thick". I think maybe a release or 3 focused entirely on performance and UI cleaning may be in order.
Its still my favorite browser though.
P.S. If anyone knows how to add that button to the FF toolbar, I would consider you a minor deity for at least a whole day.
Send three "heap-minimize" notifications in a row. Each notification triggers a global garbage collection followed by a cycle collection, and causes the process to reduce memory usage in other ways, e.g. by flushing various caches.
I keep switching from Chrome to Firefox for reasons of principle ... and keep switching back to Chrome for reasons of performance. I hate myself, but can't help it. Firefox will briefly freeze scrolling a long page. Firefox will beach ball for 15 seconds after resuming laptop from sleep. And so on. None of it is crash/burn awful, but it adds up to be just irritating enough that it makes me mental. I tolerate it until I can't (for a couple weeks), then switch back to Chrome. Just did so yesterday, which is why I'm ranting in response to this headline.
This on OS X. Couple years ago when I was using Windows 7 all the time, Firefox was great. IME the fit/finish on OS X is not the same.
tl;dr: Firefox, I want to love you and be exclusive. Please change.