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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I have two main computers. One has for continuity reasons the old version of Firefox, the other the new one.

The old version is so much more usable that I find myself using that computer much more frequently. It is rock solid with 100's of tabs open, all my extensions work and without silly restrictions on what they can and can not do and it uses a lot less memory. It's measurably faster too. I'm all for progress and improvements in software but after a long stretch of being a very ardent FF supporter I really do wonder if they have a future. If a competitor had a dream about what they could do to ruin Firefox they could not have done a better job.

Enhanced tracking protection is great but it doesn't matter if you push away your users.

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    It is rock solid with 100's of tabs open

Thanks for mentioning this right off of the bat. Often you see folks complaining about how "version XYZ of software ABC" is "too slow" or "buggy" and then 27 comments later they make it clear that they have a very nonstandard use case.

I want to be very, very clear: there is nothing "wrong" with having 100s of tabs open, and it certainly would be good if all browsers worked just as well with 500 tabs as a single tab. I'm on your side!

But, in general, people making sweeping statements about software in public have what I feel is a responsibility to be clear when they're using it in ways that are off the beaten path.

Like if I complained about "Windows being buggy", and it turned out I was using a copy of Windows 95 as a substitute for a proper realtime operating system for my spaceship's navigation computer, that's something I really ought to mention upfront.

(Not that having large numbers of tabs is that outlandish, or outlandish at all)

Setting aside possible hardware differences between the two, try doing a profile refresh, because that's messed up.

I've also got a Firefox 52 installation lying around and the new version is noticably faster.

Interesting. Thanks for the tip, I'll give that a shot. Hardware differences are negligible, in fact the machine where FF is noticeably slower is the faster machine. Especially start-up is super slow, takes a couple of minutes at times.

Try to create a new profile to compare nondestructively: "firefox --ProfileManager"

I can confirm both that newer firefox is notably more responsive than old, and that I (or an extension, though I don't have many) managed to get a ff profile into a state where it had inexplicably bad performance, esp. unpredictable long freezes.

You can also create and manage Firefox profiles using the about:profiles page.

> Especially start-up is super slow, takes a couple of minutes at times.

Something really unusual is happening then. I'd second trying with a new profile. You can get general troubleshooting advice at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-takes-long-time...

(disclaimer: i work for mozilla, but not on the browser)

That is seriously weird. I don't have the fastest machine possible yet FF starts in a second or two.

Bigger problem are the apps that consume too much CPU and memory. Unfortunately there is no nice way to avoid their killing the whole system (Linux here). But other browsers are no better. The browser makers should realize they are delivering a multiuser OS and protect the resources accordingly.

I've used cgroups in the past to handle that problem when I was using stuff that would otherwise bring down my machine. But I don't know that I'd call it a nice way; at least back then, it was a PITA to set up.

If I had to guess? Try disabling webrender on the new computer. Firefox is rolling this out by default but if your GPU sucks or has fucked up drivers for whatever reason it can cause severe performance issues.

goto about:config and search for gfx.webrender.enabled and make sure it's set to false.

EDIT: More info on the rollout https://www.ghacks.net/2019/05/20/firefox-webrender-rollout-...

Or update your GPU drivers to latest and see if that improves the situation, in many cases it does improve things. At least it did for me and a few people I know, it's not like there's a database out there where GPU bugs are tracked.

I believe the Firefox crash stats database includes both “is webrender enabled” and “what is your GPU” with crash reports, which likely relates to their choices for only enabling it for specific GPUs right now.

Webrender is only rolled out to something like 2% of users, that is unlikely to be the problem.

Please don't use old versions, for security reasons.

Sure... See this is the whole problem with upgrades: upgrades are supposed to improve things but more often than not they break things. In this case the fact that stuff would break was quite predictable. The options to continue to support the non-javascript based branch of FF with plug in support with security updates but for some reason the decision was made to totally ignore backwards compatibility and to forcibly migrate the userbase to a new version without taking into account the problems that would cause. In some cases those problems are substantial, and the security risk then is outweighed by the damage.

This is one reason why the software industry as a whole sucks, we just do not give a damn about the users.

I understand the rationale behind the move. I'm also affected. But Mozilla made the choice, and I hope it works out well for them.

I had to run waterFox to keep my old plugins working.

Something is probably wrong with your newer version.

While I agree with you that the whole addon migration was a disaster and the wounds are healing just very slowly, I don't have the impression that recent Firefox versions had any performance issues (at least on my machines).

How "old" is the old Firefox ? Firefox originally ran within a single process - which was most certainly faster for the most use-cases but had a tendency to crash and also suffered from lots of security vulnerabilities.

Just for my understanding, any special reason to have 100's of tabs open?

Meaning: I basically have a mindset which as a programmer would say: "shall I spend effort trying to optimize my app for users that have 200 tabs open? Naaaa, I don't see a usecase for that to happen."

Yes, sure. I do technical due diligence for a living and when researching a particular company every time I come across another interesting link that hasn't changed color yet I open another tab. Then I just keep reading until there are no more tabs open, and no more interesting notes to take. It's part of my workflow (and one of the reasons why the scrapbook add-on is essential to me, another reason I do my work on the older machine).

> the scrapbook add-on is essential to me

I found the ScrapbookQ plugin, which also is able (with some work, admittedly) to import data from the old Scrapbook plugin:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapbookq/

I'm hovering around 250 tabs these days and it's doing fine, but most of those aren't loaded. Sounds like yours would be. You might want to try a tab unloading extension.

Oohh, ok, I think that I got it (you keep opening new/unknown links in additional tabs and once you have them all you go through them) - thx.

Optimize for the user who has 100s of tabs open or the user who has 10 tabs but one is Slack.

This is funny - here in Switzerland & Germany I have never, ever heard anybody mentioning "Slack". I read about it the first time when I was reading docs & posts about the chat riot.im/matrix some months ago (maybe in connection with the Matrix "bridges") and from time to time here on HN but I never payed much attention to it.

An alternative and pretty useful point of view is: optimizing for 100s of tabs essentially creates new use cases that weren't possible before.

It happens when you use tabs as bookmarks. The solution is to use bookmarks.

Using tabs as bookmarks is just so much easier that I find I don't use bookmarks anymore.

Perhaps there should be a way to passivate tabs so that they don't take up memory when they are not used for a while.

Wanted to point out that there are a few different firefox addons that allow you to suspend tabs which does unload them. I believe there is at least one with a timer to automatically suspend tabs as well. (sorry can't point out examples now)

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