I recently tried switching back to FF from Chrome and I find FF to lag horribly. Downloads are frequently broken and stall. The <filename>, <filename.part> thing is ridiculous. It feels like there is a molasses powered queue between input events and response, FF feels like a drunken master. I am in Chrome right now, I wish I was in FF.
Broken / stalled downloads don't sound like a Firefox problem to me. If you can reliably get a DL to fail in Firefox (that works fine in another browser) and reproduce it, file a bug :-)
I can't get things to reliably fail, admittedly the connections I am on are flaky. I have been traveling around the world for the last 8 months. From direct experience I know that Chrome handles flakey connections much better than FF. I routinely get downloads that are completely stuck in FF, showing 20KB/S as a download speed but the file hasn't been touched in 5 minutes and nothing gets written to disk and the activity monitor shows 0KB/s of network traffic. I would open a bug, but I would have to write a server that would expose the problem, no decent repro case and it wouldn't get fixed.
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edit, Many times I have to pause a download and then resume to get the dl unstuck.
I refuse to install Chrome, but do install the pure open-source Chromium. I routinely get that behavior with Chrom[e|ium], which leaves files with a crx extension littered throughout my Downloads directory.
But to be fair from both our ends, neither is that useful individual anecdote(s) != empiricism.
Yeah, I have been toying with how to write a server to automated test cases to repro these bugs. Almost all issues I have with browsers is how they behave on slow connections. On the very fast and reliable connections we have in the states, many of the issues are not present.
That's strange the only browser I got problems with downloading files is Chrome. Sometimes it takes a long time between clicking the download and seeing any visual clue from chrome that it started the download.
