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Comment by tnorthcutt | Hacker News Reader

I switched to Firefox recently, partly because of this issue. I used it for 2-3 months, but eventually went back to Chrome because of poor performance; Firefox frequently lagged on typing input, hung, etc. in situations where Chrome does not. I hope things improve.

Caveat: I was using Firefox Developer Edition... I wonder if "normal" FF would be better.

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The stable release of Firefox hasn't lagged or given me any troubles. Neither on my work PC nor on my personal 5 year old laptop with mere 4 Gigs of RAM and no SSD.

Disclaimer : I use about 6 privacy focused addons in total.

Which addons? I'm currently using Vimium-FF and Ublock Origin.

Not OP but EFF's Privacy Badger is pretty great.

Privacy Possum is a better fork of Privacy Badger.

PrivacyBadger, Ublock Origin, UMatrix and lately Toggle Resist Fingerprinting.

It would be great if you could capture a performance profile: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance...

Been on FF for a year now. I can say I like it better than chrome. And use it on mobile.

I use Developer Edition on an 8 y/o PC and it doesn't lag. Even with 500 tabs open (using a tab suspender.

I wonder if this is just because developers aren't testing or using firefox frequently enough to catch such bugs? I maintain several internal web apps for my current company and am guilty of this, all our users use chrome, all our developers use chrome, so our app unintentionally works best in chrome.

You should try normal cause I have never seen these on the normal release version.

It really depends on your browsing habits I have found, essentially how many tabs you have going at once.

I tend to be very frugal in my use of tabs, maybe 30 at any one time and even then very briefly and I don't have any issues.

To put this in perspective, I'm on a Librebooted T400 machine, so 4GB RAM on a Core 2 Duo and it FF hasn't been a major issue at all. Everyone's mileage may vary.

I've been running Firefox Nightly for 2 years now and it's consistently as fast as Chrome. I keep Chrome open only so I can access gmail. Everything else is in FF.

> I keep Chrome open only so I can access gmail

Why? Doesn't it work with Firefox?

It seems to be a little slower, but not (for me at least) by enough to make it worthwhile to run a whole second browser.

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