SOT: Who is the fairest browser of them all?

I have long been a fan of Firefox. But somewhere in between versions 2 and 3.5 it started behaving like a black-hole of resources, sucking up more and more memory, growing increasing sluggish. Not to mention taking forever to start up. So fickle user that I am, I have been trying out other browsers while I give Firefox one last chance before giving it the boot.

Of course one of the browsers I am (re-)trying is Chrome. I did use it briefly when it first came out. But quickly gravitated back to my beloved Firefox, with all of its wonderful extensions and flexible configuration. But I will admit Chrome is extremely fast. No news there. What was a nice surprise was its mini-Task-Manager (Shft-Esc) and the "Stats for Geeks" breakdown.

Meanwhile, I did some file shuffling and installed a completely fresh copy of FireFox 3.5.5. Just to see if I could get a sense of whether the true culprit was FireFox itself, a specific setting or one of my plugins. I tried to start with as little functionality and minimal settings as possible. Not all of them are relevant. But in the interest of full disclosure, here is a run down of the changes I made to the default settings:

Plugins:
- *Disabled* all of the plugins detected by default (EXCEPT Shockwave Flash 10.0.32.18)

I always wondered why my plugin list displayed certain entries I never added explicitly. It turns out it is due to Firefox's automatic scan for common plugins: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Plugin_scanning#Related_preferences

Extensions:
- *Added* Echofon (aka TwitterFox)

Privacy:
- *Changed* Remember browsing history to (at least 30 days)
- *Disabled* Remember search and form history
- *Enabled* Clear history when Firefox closes: everything

Cache:
- *Changed* Cache settings to use up to 30MB
Reason: Sometime after upgrading to FF3+, I noticed the autosuggest feature in the location bar had changed. It got progressively slower over time. So I am experimenting with a lower history threshold to see how it performs (before taking the extreme step of disabling it entirely).

Content:
- *Disabled* Java (No point enabling it since I disabled the plugin)

Startup:
- *Changed* Show a blank page

Update:
- *Changed* When updates to Firefox are found: (Ask me what I want to do)

So far Firefox is doing a lot better. Definitely faster, though maybe not quite as fast as Chrome. At one point I had 15 tabs open in Firefox (only one with Flash Content). Firefox peaked at around 160-180M memory usage in the windows Task Manager and still remained very responsive.

Now to start adding back a plugin at a time, and wait for ugly things to happen. Though I have to say I am enjoying reading some of the more creative ways people express their displeasure with the latest versions of Firefox.

Update November 19, 2009: I am now experimenting with the Firefox 3.6b3 beta and also a plugin called AFOM 2.0 for memory management. (Note: I do not know if this plugin officially supports 3.6b3 yet). But the results from my limited testing seem very promising. (Windows only)

Update November 27, 2009: While the plugin helps, there are still issues. I think it is time to declare defeat. The memory problem is definitely Firefox!