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Comment by dralley | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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)

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