Hacker News Reader

XUL was one thing that prevented me from using Firefox back in the day, as my PC was slow and whole UI just lagged, as compared to native Windows applications. That's why my main browser then was Opera. Funny enough, Electron now has similar issues with application menus, as they have some lag and works a bit different (compared to native implementation) than one might expect when using keyboard navigation.

View on HN

When was this? I remember that Firefox (or Phoenix, or Firebird) was very fast compared to other browsers (esp. full Mozilla) when it came out.

Early on Firefox felt fast for sure (on most platforms anyway), but at some point around 4.x or 5 I wanna say it started slowing noticeably, and it would continue on that path until Quantum or thereabouts.

On OS X though Firefox always felt a noticeably more laggy and clunky than any other app it might be running alongside — something about the Mac implementation of XULRunner wasn’t optimal and it showed… even if you painstakingly skinned Firefox to match OS X perfectly visually, it still felt kinda slow and clunky. That’s why Camino, which was a Gecko browser with a Cocoa/AppKit UI came into existence, and it always felt a good deal more responsive than Firefox did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com