Firefox uses lots of memory too. In fact, both browsers will happily consume as much memory as they can get their hands on in order to try to make things faster -- they'll hold pages you've navigated away from in RAM for a while so the back button is faster (and in fact some pages have code on them that REQUIRE the browser does that) and speculatively preload stuff that they think you're GOING to look at soon.

For Chrome, I recommend "The Great Suspender" extension if you want to change that behavior. The extension makes tabs you haven't looked at in a few minutes unload themselves so they're not using up much memory or any CPU time. You can click on the suspend notice in any tab to make it reload itself back to where you were before. For pages that do live updates (Twitter, for example) you'll want to whitelist them so they can keep running in the background.

Netscape was my first browser outside of IE as well. Back in 2004 when I shared a Dell Laptop with my mother, we each had our own accounts on Windows XP and for some reason, while my mother could open IE on her account, I could not on mine. I'd always end up with a "This program has encountered a problem and must shut down" pop-up. I remember, at first, my mother didn't believe me when I told her this since she could open it.
She learned since then that I don't lie.

This was before I'd known of Firefox. That didn't happen until April 2005 when my father bought HP desktops for my mother and I and my cousin/uncle(yeah weird situation there) took it upon himself while setting mine up in my bedroom to put Firefox on it. From that point, I swore by it for years, it was excellent.
See my OP for why I ended up switching to Chrome a few years ago. To add to that, even though my Acer laptop was up there in age as it experienced problems with Firefox I'd been reading that Firefox had recently been known for an increasing amount of crashing incidents.

I use firefox exclusively, with the layout heavily modified.

On the PC, my default is Pale Moon, which is a FF clone. I also use FF and Chrome and only use IE when I absolutely have to.

On the Mac, it's Safari and Chrome. ;-)

I use Firefox, because for whatever reason, running Chrome randomly crashes my laptop. Anywhere from a few seconds to several hours after I open it. No idea what the cause is.

I use Google Chrome, unless I need to double something, like my dA, when I also use Firefox.

Firefox is the best option for me!

I use both Firefox and Chrome. They have a huge collection of extensions that help me to do my work.

They are best browsers of all time.

Well I learned the basics of surfin' on good ol' IE. Like Bookmarks, Favorite Pages, and of course, how to delete Browser History before mom sees everything.

But then I switched to Chrome and never looked back.

I use Google Chrome. Mozilla Firefox crashes every few minutes for me.

I recently had to pull out MS Edge again for a site that was trying to get too fancy in Chrome (I didn't dig into it too far but my guess is that it was trying to do stuff for iOS Safari and caught Chrome by mistake) and I'm pleasantly surprised how much better Edge 13 is than IE 11.

It's still not good enough for me to switch away from Chrome for day-to-day use, mostly because all of my habits are centered around Chrome's UI, but Edge is a surprisingly respectable browser now.

But thinking about browsers has me reflecting back on the days of the Browser Wars. From IE2 to IE4, the battle between IE and Netscape (a Mozilla browser, Firefox's ancestor) was really heated, and which browser was better largely depended on which sites you were visiting because they were optimizing in different directions. But when IE 5.5 was released, it was FANTASTIC compared to Netscape.

I use Safari on iphone because it's there. Otherwise, on my laptop I use Chrome with Edge as a backup. In my coding course I bounced between the two just to check things, and on occasion an odd little glitch would come up where new coding changes refused to show up in Chrome, but would appear in Edge. Never did figure out why, since Chrome would eventually fix itself and it wouldn't be a problem again.

Considering Safari is the ONLY browser available for iPhone, you don't really have a choice. :P Even iOS Chrome is just Safari with a little wrapper on it.

As for your coding course, that's just your web cache. Edge is somewhat more aggressive about reloading while Chrome is trying to keep normal (non-developer) use fast. You can disable Chrome's cache for development with a checkbox in the developer console.

I use Chrome mostly. Firefox for some games that don't work on chrome, but Firefox causes weird problems and crashes, especially on reddit, or anywhere I click a lot of links and stuff,so I stick with chrome. On my phone I use Chrome, too.