For me, performance aspects related to hardware, like RAM or CPU usage are almost never a concern. I have not experienced a crash or slowdown because a browser ate the ram in years - but I also don’t run particularly demanding tasks so most of the time there’s a lot of capacity left open. What is far more frequent to me are websites that misbehave or perform worse in Firefox. The most obvious culprit here would be Google and their office suite + Youtube, but also sites that are not from Google (educational suites like Blackboard are terrible).
Of course it could also be plausible that I do not visit the sites that break in Chrome, but do not do so in Firefox.
Most of the time that’s true for me, too, at least on my main desktop PC, where I have plenty of resources and never feel the shortage. On my old laptop, however, it’s a different matter.
I find the execution speed to be much more important than resource usage, though: sluggish, laggy software is terrible, and Firefox is slightly worse than Chrome in that aspect. However, I tolerate all the flaws of Firefox-based browsers, simply because I hate Goolag. It’s a matter of priorities, there is really no good option here, only less bad.
As a hard core plasma user, I started experimenting with Qupzilla (rebranded as Falkon nowadays under the KDE umbrella) long ago. It still temains my primary browser to this day. Having FF as my secondary & while taking occasional strolls with Chromium & Vivaldi (having adopted the principal “different browsers for different tasks”).
Like The Linux Experinent, all I want is a snappy browser & preferably not Chromium or Gecko based, simple (but not barebones), with a good performance & low resources usage. thus my choice for Falkon.
Yes, there are concerns about the project being abandoned, but Falkon, in my understanding & info taken from Reddit discussions, is not. It supports QwebEngine which is the actual browser engine by Qt, based on Blink. This is a miss-understanding on how KDE technologies work. It’s not under particularly active development, but there’ve been various fixes and tweaks over the last few months. Taking a look at its slow development, we can see the last commit to the browser was made on 23 August & the last commit to the Qtwebenging just a day ago!! And since it uses QtWebEngine, the rendering engine and JS interpreter are constantly updated upstream.
After all, neither Qupzilla nor Falkon are known for frequent updates. Actually I have seen this last Falkon release being called as “Falkon 2021”.
For a smaller task that doesn’t involve much research, I use Firefox: reading the news; accessing a service on a regular basis (including the EndeavourOS forums); paying a bill on an existing account; viewing bank statements.
For a project that requires research, I use Vivaldi for its ability to group tabs into Tab Stacks:
. Nothing compares! It’s all i need and all i want!