I can't find that text on the page at the moment, but it's the truth.
Firefox (3.6) seems to have a really nasty problem in its garbage collection system. If I leave it open for more than a couple of days, under normal use, it starts hanging for a couple of seconds every minute to half-minute -- and it hangs for longer, more often, the longer I leave it open.
Closing and restarting Firefox seems to clear the issue up. At least, for a while.
The only reason I still use Firefox is because of AdBlock Plus. The moment someone comes up with a replacement that's as good, I'm done with it and never looking back.
edit: oh, and by the way: this bug, combined with Google "Instant"? Very not the best thing ever.
I regularly ran Firefox 3.6 (I'm on v4 now) for weeks at a time, and never had such issues. I'd guess it's an extension or plugin you had installed.
My biggest problem with Firefox (v4 only) is shutting it down takes ages as it iterates through every file in the cache, which is encrypted on my machine. I limited my cache size to 50MB, which seems to have limited the pause times to something reasonable.
I cannot stand Chrome though; I hate the way it selects text on the page with the mouse (I'm a compulsive selection-reader), and the cobbled-together extension replacements for the Bookmarks menu don't work nearly as well as a proper menu.
I do have a few extensions installed & enabled -- AdBlock Plus, Firebug, Greasemonkey (rarely used, I should just uninstall it), Flashblock, and YSlow.
But, I've seen similar behavior on at least one other system, and the only extension we had in common there was AdBlock Plus. The behavior also predates Greasemonkey.
The other system is newer, and the slowdown there is less pronounced (though still noticeable), which leads me to suspect that there's some task that runs regularly that performs well enough on fast enough systems to be less problematic, but becomes a miserable dog on older systems -- a pretty typical case of programmer "fast enough for me".
Apropos of nothing: I don't get you compulsive selection readers. I'm always a little bemused when one of you speaks up. Why do you do that? It's so weird. :-)
There's also an "AddBlock Plus" for Chrome, and a short test shows it that works decently, but I don't know if the quality is the same. Maybe worth a try?
If that is the case than drop FF and switch to ChromePlus because it overs what you want. Although not as convenient as FF, still I haven't looked back.
This is more-or-less exactly what you do with Chrome all the time. Because each tab is a separate process, you're implictly closing and opening it for each new tab.
I pointed this out on a Reddit thread quite a while back, started by some Firefox devs. Or maybe it was Opera devs. Anyway, I was surprised by the response: neither the devs, nor other commenters in the thread, saw the benefit to making every tab its own process.
I have trouble taking that at face-value; Linux seems to do OK with it and, for a while, there was a little-bitty web browser for Macs called Stainless (http://stainlessapp.com/) that did one-process-per-tab, and it seemed quite performant. Better, in fact, than all other browsers at the time. Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated in about a year now...
> Note that chrome's default is not per-tab either.
Oh yeah, somebody pointed that out to me back on that Reddit thread, too. I forgot. Still, I really think it should be, and that it should be considered standard practice for all browsers.
A while back, my frustrations with browsers resulted in a quickie project that I called "Crash My Browser" (still up at http://crashmybrowser.com/). I haven't tested it with recent browsers, but, once upon a time, at least one of the tests on that page could completely cripple not just that page's tab, but the entire browser, for most browsers. Since nobody seemed to get why that was a really stupid design flaw, I figured a demonstration was in order.
I know I'm a bit late with my reply, but I don't follow hacker news all too much.
That said, in general, IPC is slower than threading for the simple reason that processes are in different address spaces. When you perform an IPC call, you must take a TLB hit. With communication between threads, there is only context switching overhead (assuming no preemption between calls.)
Chrome has a few different ways to do tab communication, none of which are truly "one process per tab".
That surprises me too, since Mozilla has been working on retrofitting their codebase to allow running web-content in a separate process for some time now:
To prevent this from happening don't use flash with Firefox or really any browser! It can handle one or two instances of flash running at the same time but anymore watch out .. FlashCrash!
Tip: If Firefox is slow / consuming too much memory, start a private browsing session then close the browser. When you restart it, all the tabs will re-open to the previous pages, and the memory footprint is usually smaller.
