Plus, Firefox suspends tabs you haven’t visited in a while when your computer is running low on memory.Īpart from these big releases, Firefox has also gained plenty of little, yet significant updates. This prioritization trick allows Firefox to process popular websites like Amazon and Instagram anywhere from 40% to 80% quicker. For instance, on a news website, it will load an article’s content before all the ads and newsletter modules. Starting from v.67, Firefox began breaking down webpages to understand which components need to be rendered first and which ones can wait. One of the recent major performance updates arrived in May when Mozilla natively integrated a handful of clever optimizations for which users previously had to rely on third-party extensions. This rare balance of efficiency and performance is the result of the countless under-the-hood upgrades Firefox has rolled out in the last couple of years. On Firefox, my 2015 MacBook Pro’s fans don’t blast past my noise-canceling headphones, which happened fairly regularly on Chrome as it pushed my laptop’s fans to their helicopter-like limits to keep things running. It’s rare that I’m forced to close an existing tab to make room for a new one. I don’t have to think twice before firing up yet another tab. Today, in addition to being fast, Firefox is resource-efficient, unlike most of its peers. Since Firefox’s 2017 overhaul, Mozilla has been pushing updates around the clock. The biggest draw for me was, of course, the fact that Mozilla Firefox can finally go toe-to-toe with Google Chrome on the performance front, and often manages to edge it out as well. And somehow, months later, I’m still writing this piece in Google Docs on Firefox. Similar to my earlier experiments, I updated Firefox to the latest version, fired up my usual set of web apps, and crossed my fingers.

In November, fed up with Chrome’s resource-hogging practices and Google’s growing web monopoly, I gave Firefox another shot. Catching up to Chrome almost started to seem like a far-fetched goal for Firefox - until recently. No matter how compelling the rest of Mozilla’s offerings were, they could never convince me to hit that “Yes” button whenever Firefox asked whether I’d like to set it as my default browser. Fitbit Versa 3įirefox’s performance would fall noticeably short and struggle to keep up with my workflow, sending me scurrying back to Google Chrome after a few minutes of poking around.

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