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Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

In what meaningful way is there any difference in speed between Chrome and Firefox on Android?

I also prefer replacing uBlock Origin with Ad Nauseum which is built on top of ubo.

On any media or JS heavy site, Firefox on Android lags. Also for whatever reason small stuff like text boxes, zoom, keyboard pop up and tab zoom out animations have significant jitter. UI elements seem to be out of step with platform conventions. It's not the sort of thing that's easy to file a bug report for but you need a staff UX and performance engineer to go over it with a fine toothed comb to iron out the bugs. The current version feels very raw. You get the same vibe as a poorly optimized React Native app. Slight jitters here and there and a dropped frame on some animations. There is plenty of small stuff like the tab switching animation that feels slow. Nothing that will show up on a screen recording but immediately obvious if you are switching between Chrome and Firefox running on the same device. I suspect the root cause is that Firefox implemented a significant part of their UI in JS/HTML instead of native but I haven't checked the source code so that's just a hypothesis. On 2026 flagships, there's no excuse for it not to have a butter smooth UI (Oryon core chips are approaching laptop level of performance).

I use a 2019 flagship phone (an s10e), and Firefox for Android is butter-smooth for me. So I cannot imagine why it would be janky for you with your multiple-times-faster modern phone?

Sounds like you're describing Firefox from around the time my phone was made (which was indeed slow and janky, and had lots of UI issues).

Had dailied redmi note 12 4g, with debloat, ublock and selective uscript block. Many js/media heavy websites (that needed to have their js enabled to be viewed) lagged under firefox

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