Hacker News Reader

Comment by derekdahmer | Hacker News Reader

Just downloaded a clean install of Firefox 70 but even scrolling a simple site like Hacker News feels very laggy compared to Chrome.

Not sure whats going on. 2018 Retina MBP with dedicated GPU running Catalina.

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I'm not a normal Firefox user — I usually use Chrome and Safari side-by-side. So I decided to give FF another try with this release, and I agree that the scrolling performance is noticeably worse in FF than Safari and Chrome on the same page. I know the link here is about power usage, not performance, but it makes things feel much less nice.

Firefox touchpad scrolling feels worse than other browsers by default because of the terrible default inertia and acceleration values. If you're not opposed to some tweaking, you can get them to feel much more like Safari. Further reading: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/63cd0m/how_to_get_...

WOW this explains so much about why my experience with Firefox has felt like garbage.

Why are the defaults set this way???

I assume these are the default values that were selected a while ago, and it would be considered breakage to change them now?

Are you scrolling with a touchpad? Most of those settings don't impact touchpad scrolling. Is there a particular setting which makes the difference?

Did you try them? Several of the settings labeled "mousewheel" also affect touchpads. I don't have a touchpad on hand to check but I remember general.smoothScroll.mouseWheel.durationMaxMS making a difference as well.

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