It's not so much that Chrome is great, as that it doesn't seem to have the faults that Firefox does.
- The "hanging" issue: I literally just replaced a laptop because of this one. On my older laptop, Firefox became unusable, and got worse with each version, not better. I didn't have very many tabs open (~10?), and after about 6 hours or so, hovering the pointer over a link would give me the rainbow pinwheel, clicking a link would give me a rainbow pinwheel, opening a tab would give me a rainbow pinwheel, etc. This stalling issue has been widely reported by a huge number of people, and Firefox has been doing a lot of work on their memory management to fix it, but it doesn't seem to be helping. My girlfriend's newer Windows workstation had the same problem, but to a slightly lesser degree. In her case, Firefox became unusable after a day or two. People often point to extensions, but the only extension she had installed was AB+.
- Crashing. Just yesterday we had a client complaint where, according to them, about half the time they would go to launch Firefox, they would get the message that it was already running but not responding. We've had similar complaints from other clients, including a business client.
What makes this frustrating for me is that, like the OP, I'm pretty sure I remember when Firefox didn't have these problems. It smells like at some point they introduced some kind of terrible architectural change in the browser, and rather than address that directly, they keep trying to patch around it.
It's possible that the very newest version fixes all of these things. We made the decision to start switching off of it almost a month ago, after Mozilla firmly decided to go the frequent background updates route (and without also supporting older versions). If we have to choose to recommend one of two browsers, both of which do frequent updates, then we'll go with the one that seems to give people fewer headaches.
- The "hanging" issue: I literally just replaced a laptop because of this one. On my older laptop, Firefox became unusable, and got worse with each version, not better. I didn't have very many tabs open (~10?), and after about 6 hours or so, hovering the pointer over a link would give me the rainbow pinwheel, clicking a link would give me a rainbow pinwheel, opening a tab would give me a rainbow pinwheel, etc. This stalling issue has been widely reported by a huge number of people, and Firefox has been doing a lot of work on their memory management to fix it, but it doesn't seem to be helping. My girlfriend's newer Windows workstation had the same problem, but to a slightly lesser degree. In her case, Firefox became unusable after a day or two. People often point to extensions, but the only extension she had installed was AB+.
- Crashing. Just yesterday we had a client complaint where, according to them, about half the time they would go to launch Firefox, they would get the message that it was already running but not responding. We've had similar complaints from other clients, including a business client.
What makes this frustrating for me is that, like the OP, I'm pretty sure I remember when Firefox didn't have these problems. It smells like at some point they introduced some kind of terrible architectural change in the browser, and rather than address that directly, they keep trying to patch around it.
It's possible that the very newest version fixes all of these things. We made the decision to start switching off of it almost a month ago, after Mozilla firmly decided to go the frequent background updates route (and without also supporting older versions). If we have to choose to recommend one of two browsers, both of which do frequent updates, then we'll go with the one that seems to give people fewer headaches.