Browser woes

I've given it as much chance as I could stand for it to somehow correct itself but at the end of the day I have to say that Firefox has failed me.  FF has been my only main browser for what seems like as long as I can remember.  The primary reason was that it was cross platform and for the longest time I used Linux at work and Windows on the home machines, so I could use the same browser and setup on both.  But in recent years it has started to show its bloat.  Maybe it was the cool add-ons I loaded, maybe not.  One thing is for certain, it wasn't the speedy snappy browser of its youth.  That can be forgiven but lately it's been doing something aweful on my main PC.  It regularly and frequently just stalls there, whether I'm scrolling, moving the cursor, typing, anything, for several moments it would sit unresponsive, then catch up then do it again.  I've recently updated to 5.x then 6.x and the problem never went away despite there being lots of "fixes".  I have a habit of keeping a lot of tabs open and I've even gotten into the habit of paying special attention to close many AND to actually starting and restarting my browser in an attempt to free up resources.  I ended up putting up with that  for long enough, and the constant freezes were the last straw.

So lately I switched to using Chrome.  I had it installed some time back but never used it as a primary browser like I intend to now.  I gotta say, the snappiness and absence of stalls is refreshing.  In fact, VERY REFRESHING.  VERY!  I'm reminded of an article that I can't remember the details of but it concerned people getting used to having to reboot Windows to solve problems, and expecting software to basically suck... all because that's the only experience many people can have.  Can't really fault them for not having money to own multiple computers with different operating systems for comparison.  Even I don't feel like I have the time to, say, migrate to working on a Mac when what I have works (most of the time).

Anyhow, Chrome is good.  I'm going to keep using it for the time being. It's STILL missing a few things that I grew to depend on in FF, especially these add-ons:  Downthemall, DWhelper, and TreeStyleTabs (and to some extent Google Toolbar).  Nothing available for Chrome approaches the level of the FF versions.  If either of them get their act together (what I want available in Chrome, or FF fixing their performance fiasco, though hopefully both), then I will re-evaluate.  Until then, I'm going to be stuck doing most stuff in Chrome and certain things in Firefox.  A bit of a sad state of affairs.