I use an AMD 1.6 GHZ powered netbook with 2GB RAM running Arch Linux. Chromium is unbearably slow after opening a few tabs. Firefox chugs along just fine.
I have always noted that behavior, Chrome has a better memory management with a few tabs opened, but if you start opening a bunch of them, then Firefox clearly wins the memory battle.
That's probably because it shares memory between tab processes, since each tab is not in its own sandbox like in Chrome. Personally, I prefer the security of tab sandboxes.
Yeah, the latest Firefoxes are plenty fast, in both JS and DOM. And for that matter, so is IE10, though they iterate much slower and tend to fall behind over time on that basis.
You lost me there. Latest Firefox easily rivals Chrome for both startup and initialization time.