I've been using Firefox and Jetbrains for about a decade. Firefox is currently using 0.8% CPU while streaming music in another tab. The only speed difference between it and Chrome is that Chrome will prefetch pages in the background, which appears to make it faster on clicks. However, even were it much slower than Chromium alternatives, I would never give up my fully functioning uBlock Origin.

But anyway, in regards to Jetbrains, its performance certainly seems to be degrading over time. I'll try to explain why I still use it. First of all there is high friction to change IDEs when I have memorized every shortcut and configured every panel to my liking. I have within my IDE the terminal, the DB viewer and query executor, the debugger, the profiler, HTTP client, LLM chat, etc. Configuring all of this elsewhere would be a large pain in the ass, especially when switching computers/jobs.

More sticky still is the functionality. I've unfortunately become reliant upon, or perhaps fortunately been able to learn, the advanced features of the thing. Advanced refactoring tools that I trust to work without review, because they do. Quick shortcuts to insert large chunks of custom boilerplate. Perfect inference of method definitions/sources (try this in a Rails codebase in VSCode; it doesn't work). Other such things that I take for granted but that probably aren't in the competitors.

It might be possible to replicate this functionality with about thirty plugins from random authors in vim/VSC, but I'd rather just pay my yearly license fee and get good working software. Yes, it takes a couple of seconds to do certain things, but it saves me a lot more time than that.

I don't know how their IDEs were advertised to you or how large the codebases you work on are.

I get fast enough autocomplete (sub second), and full line completion just fine, and I never use/buy top of the line systems. (using a midrange ~2020 thinkpad).

But I'm in a similar place as the comment you replied to. Unless they start focusing again on improving they existing product line, next year I might not renew my licenses anymore.

Before AI took over, I was following closely their release notes and announcements because there where on the right path on improving experience.

What makes their IDE look bad is their indexing process, during which it is slow and completions will not show up. If you know about this quirk you know where to look for it (it's visible in the status bar), and know what triggers it (dependencies installation and such). After so many years, I really feel the solution for that is pretty "simple", "just" run the indexing on a snapshot that is not shared with the running instance and swap out indexes when done.

I know about the indexing, marking directories correctly so as not to trigger reindexing etc etc.

Since i work on a couple dozen services in a monorepo in a few languages, no amount of heap memory or CPU will be enough.

One days its the grapqhl plugin, the next day its typescript type inferrence, then something with rust, it just never stops. Sometimes even the golang operations are slow.

Its all just monorepo issues, but i expect my IDE to be able to handle a monorepo, all other IDEs work without issue (and are inferior in functionality sadly)

Everyone who promotes a product they use every day doesn't have to be a paid shill. I like PyCharm, DataGrip, and IntelliJ because they generally work very well for me at my day job and open source side projects.

Firefox is an odd case because I've personally never experienced stability issues with it on Ubuntu. The only problem I've had in the past is some Google products are noticeably slower than on Chromium. Colleagues of mine have had stability issues on Windows though.

Yeah, I'm not a paid shill. I have been using IntelliJ since version 2 way back in 2003(?). Yes, it's had its performance issues, but people tend to forget the feature set they brought to market, and have continued to do so. But, my career is dead now, as I am an unemployed loser. So, 2026 will probably be the first year that I no longer have an updated IntelliJ.

I'm about to cancel mine as well, but JetBrains really does make top quality editors, especially for their respective languages, the next closest one would be Visual Studio for C# / .NET development, and even VS gets enhanced by ReSharper... which is a JetBrains product. I would like it if JetBrains would invest in the performance isssues as a #1 priority. They've dropped the ball on Kotlin Native and it bewilders me, it had so much more potential to their benefit.