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Comment by asr | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, this seems like a real missed opportunity by Mozilla. As Chrome reigns in extensions that conflict with Google's business model, this is a reason to use Firefox.

BUT - extensions are also often the cause of a slow and frustrating Firefox experience, which then leads folks to talk about how Chrome is better-performing/faster (I've been guilty of this myself in the past). Mozilla needs to make sure Firefox is keeping pace with Chrome, which they've presumably decided means de-emphasizing extensions.

That said, not sure why Mozilla needs to de-emphasize donation buttons.

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>BUT - extensions are also often the cause of a slow and frustrating Firefox experience, which then leads folks to talk about how Chrome is better-performing/faster

IE (used to?) have this bottom notification warning about 'X plugin is slowing IE, would you like to disable it?'. Perhaps Firefox should add similar feature and notify users about slow plugins, maybe even with some actual data instead of a vague slowness claim.

Mozilla does this already, to a degree. Using the Dark Reader extension hangs some sites for several seconds and Mozilla asks me if I'd like to kill it

The issue is more with extensions that don't hang but slows you down throughout your usage. Especially if there are couple of those you feel that the browser is sluggish but don't associate it to the extensions.

Your extensions are listed along with their resource usage in about:performance !

At first I thought nice to know, but that won't help most people.

Then I went to check it out and found that I don't remember opening it since it's pretty much useless. It does show how much memory each consume and the _current_ energy impact. Utterly meaningless and doesn't help me at all to understand that a certain extension slows my browsing experience.

There’s a real discoverability issue with those kind of pages. They should be listed somewhere in some submenu. You can’t expect people to go through all the documentation like they used to go through manuals in decades past.

Chrome has chrome://chromeurls and Firefox has about:about (Firefox chrome urls tend to be actual browser resources, not information or settings or debugging. Eg with xul you used to be able to open the toolbars/browser ui itself in a window)

Chrome has about:about at least

Which browser extension is responsible for making Firefox slow as a slug when deleting large numbers history entries?

I've not checked the source, but my guess is firefox stores the history in a SQLite db and when you select 500 history items then delete them, it's doing 500 DELETEs, maybe even without a proper index. It's seriously slow.

There seems to be a lot of low hanging fruit in Firefox, but not being employed by Mozilla I don't particularly feel like my thoughts or contributions are welcome. The last time reported a bug on bugzilla.mozilla.org (which is a pain in the neck) I was told that accessibility on MacOS wasn't important enough for Mozilla to care about (paraphrasing.)

I think it’s not 500 deletes, but it’s certainly not great. There is definitely an index. If you can repro this, you should file a bug for it, I’ve noticed it being slow too, but couldn’t repro it recently. If you file a bug for this, you can CC me (tcsc at mozilla dot com).

I believe/guess it manifests most noticably when you have a large amount of history, so it might be hard to repro with a fresh profile. I'm on the road away from a real computer, but when I get back I'll give it a shot.

> BUT - extensions are also often the cause of a slow and frustrating Firefox experience

I doubt that this is true. Some extensions like Adblockers even make browsing faster.

For a demonstration install Dark Reader on an ageing or budget machine. It can render Chrome sluggish and frustrating and Firefox almost unusable.

There's a fair few others that can upset Firefox but never seem to be the same extent of annoyance for Chrome.

I had a similar problem with Owl, it's because they typically use CSS filters to achieve dark mode. It's frustrating because it's a very bad solution but it's easy to not realize that the extension is causing the problem (especially because browsers work hard to hide it)

That does show up one area that Chrome still eclipses Firefox - the Shift Esc task manager that will usually reveal which tab or extension is cratering things. Firefox is much more opaque about memory and especially CPU use, making it far harder to pin down.

Do you know about about:performance?

Firefox has a task manager now. They should improve on this to compete with Googles. Nobody wants to type a URL when they can hit an easy shortcut.

I have a hope of remembering about:performance. I can bookmark it, and it's there in autocomplete. You can make a link to it in your webpage or in a nice plugin (which, once it gets a couple thousand users, you can sell to an honest businessman for tens of thousands).

Shift-Escape? what? I'm supposed to just randomly press every key combination till something happens?

If you can remember the hotkey for Windows task manager, sure. It's Ctrl+Shift+ESC. If not, you can access it through the menu.

A shortcut is better than clicking the Hamburger menu icon, then "More" then Task Manager / typing it into the browser.

Why not both (if the shortcut is available)?

I reset Firefox recently on an ancient Linux laptop and before I got uBlock origin set back up the browser was nearly unusable. I had taken for granted how much it was doing. If I ever get out of this deep financial hole I am sending gorhill a large donation (if he accepts, I recall in the past he wasn't taking any). One of the most, if not THE most useful QOL add-ons in my view.

The list maintainers deserve a lot of the credit too, the blocklists probably takes a lot of time to keep up to date.

Dark Reader which is one of my must-haves has a known Firefox performance issue on a LOT of sites that makes Firefox almost unusable for me, so I recently begrudgingly switched back to Chrome.

https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/issues/535

>Unfortunately Firefox is terribly slow in unpredictable places. I periodically try to find out what exactly makes it work slow in Firefox. For example this change improved twitter.com loading from ~30s to ~1s.

His change[0] was changing array population from repeated concat to push. This is not an unpredictable hot spot but a developer not knowing his tools. Common sense is not premature optimization.

[0] https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/commit/09b24d052e07...

LastPass makes the browser slower and sometimes even locks up the tab. It definitely does happen.

> extensions are also often the cause of a slow and frustrating Firefox experience

You have any recent data on this? I am not convinced this is true anymore.

This used to be a problem with legacy extensions because their APIs pre-dated the multi-process effort and forced Firefox into single-process mode.

In over a year of using Firefox every day I haven't noticed any slowdowns after Firefox made the move to drop compatibility for those extensions.

Extensions rarely cause slowness. Plugins (e.g. Flash) do.

I agree, 100% - missed opportunity for Mozilla.

Statements like this make me long for the days where extensability and customizability reigned supreme

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