Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Mozilla Firefox vs. Waterfox

I have been waiting for a very, very long time for Mozilla Firefox to release a 64-bit version that was originally promised several months ago so I consequently switched over to Waterfox--a 64-bit derivative version of Mozilla Firefox.

This was primarily due to the reason that opening a very large number of tabs in Mozilla Firefox was causing the browser to crash often and become very sluggish.

However, it seems that with the latest releases of Mozilla Firefox (v. 42.0 as of this writing), this problem has been resolved!

Instead, I am now finding that Waterfox by far is a much more sluggish browser when it comes to opening a large number of tabs (presumably because the community of developers working on Waterfox is considerably smaller than those working on Mozilla Firefox).

As you may have discovered if you install Waterfox and Mozilla Firefox on the same machine, because they both use the Mozilla engine, either Waterfox or Mozilla Firefox can be running at any given time--they can never be running at the same time.  However, this unique property also allows them to share the same settings including the tabs they open!

In a test that I did of opening 50+ tabs in Waterfox and Mozilla Firefox, opening the same exact same set of tabs caused Waterfox to become so sluggish that it could take a minute or more to load a single web page, while Mozilla Firefox handily managed loading a new web page very speedily in a matter of seconds!

While I would still like to see a 64-bit version of Mozilla Firefox be released in the near future, now that most of the performance issues have been resolved, I am going to revert to using the 32-bit version of Mozilla Firefox for the foreseeable future!


1 comment:

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