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Comment by andrewvc | Hacker News Reader

I try to switch to FF every 3mo. or so. EVERY TIME I try it gets sluggish if I have even a modest number of tabs open.

I really like what Mozilla is doing, but why is it that they just can't make a browser as snappy as Chrome?

That's gotta be a plugin, mate. I have the reverse problem: Chrome is slow, but Firefox is snappy. I know in the last few months FF fixed an issue where css cache was per-tab, which meant plug ins (like adblock plus) which add huge stylesheets to every tab had a huge memory load.

The only slowness I get with ff is when I have lots of heavy js tabs open for more than a day. In my case that's gInbox, gcal, ghangouts, trello (with heavy plugins), Facebook, and then my normal browsing tabs. Even then, I only notice the slowness when I instantiate a new window.

I haven't been rigorous about testing it, but I think Inbox messes with mine too. Firefox will eat an entire CPU core for multiple seconds every time I click in any text box, or close a tab, or load a new tab in the background. It's the main process that uses CPU, not the content process. This is on Win7, and my only add-ons are uBlock Origin, Ghostery, LastPass, HTTPS Everywhere.

Try disabling LastPass. I remember having similar problems on OS X when I was trying to switch from 1Password to LastPass. I didn't look into it any further and just stuck with 1Password.

It didn't seem to help much. Thanks for the tip though.

I've had problems with Firefox being sluggish to the point of stop responding to scroll events for ~1 second when loading tabs in the background, like when opening a Reddit thread in a new tab and then scrolling down on the front page. This seems to be fixed in 44 (current developer edition) if you enable three options in about:config: browser.tabs.remote.autostart [0] layers.async-pan-zoom.enabled [1] layers.offmainthreadcomposition.testing.enabled [2]

I didn't test this on previous versions, so they might work in those as well.

[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Async_Scrolling_in_e10s [2] https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2015/05/19/off-main-thread-...

Any chance you have reddit enhancement suite installed? That absolutely destroys loading times for reddit comment threads with default settings (ie: comment tweaks)

The Skype "Click to Call" plugin is another notorious performance problem, frequently crashing or hanging the UI for tens of seconds.

I do, but I have most of the settings turned off, like comment tweaks.

Computer specs? I suspect you may be doing something wrong. Firefox runs great for me.

Also, try:

1) Help --> Troubleshooting --> Refresh Firefox (i.e. wipe all your data and settings so it's a clean install).

2) Tools --> Options --> General --> Tabs --> Don't Load tabs until selected. This let's you have hundreds of tabs open without having them all loaded in memory. When you click to a tab that you haven't visited in a while, it loads the page then.

> Don't Load tabs until selected.

For me this seems to not work - yes it doesn't refresh until clicked, but it seems the tabs consume the exact same memory when "not loaded" (after restarting firefox with a bunch of tabs from the prior session).

May be you should try to disable or enable "Use hardware acceleration when available". "Use hardware acceleration when available" is problematic for me, I have disabled it.

I have a low spec machine (2009 MBP Core 2 Duo, 4G Ram) and there is day / night difference in performance between Safari 9.0.2 and FireFox. I've also been testing the multi-process FF version with no luck.

Some website like Amazon are almost unusable with lots of pausing / unresponsiveness. No plugins, clean install.

I had one site that would always load like crap on Firefox: blabbermouth.net. I would try with various cocktails of add-ons enabled and disabled, and could never figure out why my Firefox config hated that particular page so much.

At some point I installed NoScript, and the loading of that page turned snappy, so I stopped trying to troubleshoot it. I kinda assumed from then on that there must be some script running on that page that is either clobbering Firefox itself or clobbering one of the other add-ons I have running.

Snappy behavior depends on a lot of things: which sites you're on (some browsers are better at some sites than others, and none is great at all of them), multiprocess separation (e10s in Firefox, on in Nightly and it really helps a lot), your graphics card and whether the browser has blacklisted it, and of course if you happen to hit a rare perf bug (which all browsers have, not surprising given the amount of constant code churn).

Personally I find this problem can be OS dependent, so you should mention your OS when saying things like this.

On OSX FF is slugish and can take a while to start up, however on Windows 7/10 its the snappiest browser I have. Weird i know but that's how it is for me.

I should mention neither use plugins.

I use Chrome, Chromium, and Firefox on Ubuntu. They all seems equally fast (or slow). On thing I noticed though is that they all became considerably slower when I upgraded from Ubuntu 14.04 to 15.04.

What's your setup/laptop and OS? I am having a better experience with Firefox over Chrome, with 40+ tabs opened at any time.

Chrome (at least some time ago I tried it) crashes frequently and uses more memory.

What's a modest number? I regularly have about 30 open on my (Android) mobile and my desktop surpasses 100, 150 often enough.

How many tabs do you need? How many does Chrome handle, if I might ask?

I don't have the same behavior. It would be interesting to see details on your issue, response time differences, memory usage, etc.

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