Why all the hate towards Firefox?
Chrome is fast but I don't trust it one bit, Safari is nice but lacks any real kind of tweakability and security isn't exactly as robust as Firefox.
I am working for over 10 years as a web developer now. Back while I used windows as my developing platform, I loved Mozilla and Firefox. But ever since I switched to using Mac, I hated Firefox!
Don't get me wrong, I love the Mozilla foundation, I love their ways of pushing the web technologies, the support for open source and their way of trying to create new useful web standards, BUT when it comes to Firefox on the Mac... Ouch!
As a web developer I have Chrome, Firefox and Safari open, each with 10-15 tabs at any given time. Chrome is super fast, always responsive, never lags when switching between tabs, Safari the same has a good speed, can't complain. And then comes Firefox. When having 10 or 15 tabs open and switching between Tabs, Firefox always needs 1-2 seconds to load until I'm able to click or scroll on the website.
And when switching between apps like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, FTP clients and then head back into Firefox, it again takes about 2 seconds until the window becomes active and I can navigate.
Then you check how much memory each browser uses... Chrome 300MB, Safari 400MB, Firefox 1,8GB!
Firefox has a memory issue, always had and it seems always will have. No matter how many tabs you close, it won't go down. You have to restart Firefox... and that very often results in "application not responding" after working 5 hours with 15 tabs open.
All my co workers experience the same issue several times through our the day with their Macs. I have it on my work station and on my private MacBook as well as on my old MacBook from 4 years ago, so it's not an isolated issue.
Simply put, Firefox on Mac is painfully slow if you use it for several hours with multiple tabs open and need to switch between apps a lot.
Chrome is my favourite in terms of speed. Yet I still love the Mozilla foundation and thank them for all the work for the web community.