My laptop is running XP, and its a bit of an oldish machine.  Pentium M.  500 MB RAM.  80 gig hard drive.  Its running a little slower these days — seems to slow right down the instant you right click on a folder, or open up the control panel.  In fact, its so slow I don’t even use the native version of Firefox 3.0 anymore — I use Firefox portable, as its a heck of a lot faster to boot up.  We’re talking about 90 seconds versus about 30.

I like to keep my that kind of operating environment in mind as some of the discourse around Firefox vs. Chrome heats up / cools down, particularly as some of the rhetoric revolves around the speed of said browsers (of which I contributed a small at amount), one thing that sticks out that Mozilla has yet to address is how heavy Firefox has become.  Sure Firefox 3.1 might be fast.  Firefox 3.0 might be fast for some.  

But there are two damnable things in my experience that Firefox has yet to improve with each iteration, which are all the more sensitive with older laptops and PCs:

1. boot up times: As stated earlier, it takes what seems to be an age and a half for Firefox to boot up.  Its so painful I have stopped using it, for fear its going to crash and necessitate me to restart it.  I have the attention span of a gerbil at times, and boot up times — particularly on this old laptop — have sunk into the unacceptable range many months ago.

2. memory footprint: Tried booting up Firefox 3.0 just for comparison’s sake.  Right off the bat, its using about 80 mb of space.  Its not uncommon for it to use about to 200 mb, and on my desk top closer to 500 mb.   Chrome?  About 60mb.  And that’s with all kinds of tabs and theatrics going on.

Sure, part of the problem are the plugins that I’ve installed.  Perhaps I need to optimize and tweak my about:config a little better.  But really?  The gerbil part of my mind says that I don’t have to do that when there’s an easier alternative at the moment.  Quite frankly, I don’t even miss my plugins that much at this stage of the game.

I mean, let’s go back to start up times.  On this old crickety laptop, Chrome boots up in about 0.5 seconds.  BAM.  Literally a blink of an eye.  And the sheer awesomeness of *that* is going to be something that’s hard to beat in this gerbil’s mind.