At one time before Firefox was out, I was staunchly opposed to switching from my beloved IE6 to the Mozilla browser. It wasn’t until Firefox 2 (and some nudging by SkullDaisyGimp) came out that I decided to make the switch, and at the time I was happy with Firefox and its plugins.

Then Firefox 3 came out and for a while it was even better than Firefox 2, right up until they released version 3.5. From here things just started to go downhill. My experience was frequent memory overload and frequent crashes, this even when not running any plugins. It was supposed to be fixed when version 3.6 came out. But things just got slower and more unstable.

Then big promise everything will be alright when the released Firefox 4. And it did seem like things had gotten better for a little while. It was still a memory hog, and by this point Internet Explorer was better at handling memory with versions 7 and 8.

You might note I haven’t mentioned Chrome or Safari by this point. That’s because I really never considered them to be an option…especially Safari. More on that later.

By now IE9 had come out, seeming to wipe out the mistakes made in the past by Microsoft. But I held fast to using Firefox, mostly because IE’s plugins are just crap. I was now experiencing cache corruption and memory overload regularly with Firefox, which would frequently cause my browser to crash trying to view any site. Which in turn required clearing out the cache regularly because Firefox simply refuses to do it itself.

Again a new version was coming out, Firefox 5, only 3 months after version 4 came out. And again, we were promised that everything that was wrong with version 4 would be better. And again, it got worse. I found version 5 slower than version 4 and it seemed to crash way more often than it did previously. After one night having too damn near reinstall the entire thing, I had had enough.

During this time I was hearing a lot of good things about Google Chrome, now that their EULA debacle had been straightened out. So I’m giving it a go, and so far I quite like it. I think I just might stick with it for a while.

You might ask why did not consider Safari for Opera?

Safari, for me, seems to be more geared towards being a Mac browser and was really unfriendly towards Windows users. Plus none the tools I used on Firefox seem to be available for Safari. Overall Safari was just an unpleasant experience. It felt like using IE6 all over again.

Now as for Opera, I don’t know why but it just seems to be silly. One of the top plugins for it was a Spirograph clone when I tried using it. It just never felt comfortable when using it, and at the time it didn’t seem like any of the plugins I needed were available for it either.

Now don’t bombard me with a bunch of comments saying X is better than Y, or that I’m just too stupid to use Firefox. I shouldn’t have to be a certified systems engineer or a programmer to make a browser work right. Firefox simply feels less like the “community” browser from its early days and more like the “corporation’s” browser. You might chide Microsoft for IE6, but they have immensely improved since then. Mozilla seems to be doing the opposite.

I’m not TOTALLY done with Firefox just yet. I’ll keep checking in on it… after all they do have version 6, 7, and 8 getting ready to come out. No, I am not joking about that either. Maybe one of them can win me back, but for now I’m sticking with Chrome.
Note: This has been edited from its original version. I had dictated it to my smart phone while at lunch, so things didn’t quite come out as I thought. I also expanded on a few things here and there but all of my original intended statement is still there.