Firefox or Chrome (Criteria: Speed, Privacy, functionality)

[TinCow]

Only people I know who use Firefox now are Linux users. Everyone who had a Windows OS swapped to Chrome pretty much all at the same time. From the comments in this topic, it seemed ACIN, Lemur and TinCow all swapped at the similar time for the same reasons.

Yup. I switched due to bloat on my own without reading any reviews of any kind. At some point, I cannot remember when, Firefox seemed to be taking ages to start up, ages to load webpages, updatedconstantly (and intrusively), and was utilizing a massive amount of resources. It was actively aggravating me, in the same way that Netscape and IE used to back when I switched away from both of those (in that order). At that time, I knew almost nothing about Chrome, but I knew that I wasn't happy with Firefox and I hated IE so much I wasn't even willing to give it another try. So, I installed Chrome and enjoyed the result. I've been there ever since.

As I said though, I was forced to go back to Firefox at work due to IT restrictions on my computer and have found the current version to be much improved over what it was back when I switched away. It's possible that some of my objections to the old Firefox were personal things that have changed about me, rather than about Firefox. For example, basically every piece of software out there switched over to regular updates on a weekly/monthly basis rather than the old-school major release schedule with only minor bug fixes in between. So, the constant software updates are still occurring, but I don't really care as much anymore, and I can often make them automatic so I don't have to see them or deal with them anymore. The computers I'm running have also continued to increase in power over the years, so it's entirely possible that Firefox and Chrome are just as resource hungry now as before, if not more so, but it's less noticeable because multicore computers can handle it better. Regardless, at some point I grew frustrated with Firefox on my own without outside input, and gave Chrome a try just because it was an alternative I had heard about but hadn't experienced yet.

Honestly, the new IE (actively required for some of my work systems) isn't really that bad either. However my hatred of IE still burns bright enough to keep me away from it for several more years, even if it performs better than anything else out there.

[drone]

Somewhere in the 3.X.X - 5 range, there was a significant amount of memory leakage in Firefox, and it did cause problems if you didn't restart the browser periodically. But once they got that sorted out it's been pretty solid.

[TinCow]

Somewhere in the 3.X.X - 5 range, there was a significant amount of memory leakage in Firefox, and it did cause problems if you didn't restart the browser periodically. But once they got that sorted out it's been pretty solid.

That seems about right, I think I switched around version 4.

[Xiahou]

Honestly, the new IE (actively required for some of my work systems) isn't really that bad either. However my hatred of IE still burns bright enough to keep me away from it for several more years, even if it performs better than anything else out there.

Ditto that. Also, I'll have a hard time ever trusting IE from a security standpoint.