Hacker News Reader

Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

There is something about this site that absolutely destroys Firefox when scrolling. Expensive work in a scroll handler isn't good guys :(

View on HN

I would not be too quick to blame the authors of the website. It seems likely to be the same Firefox bug as all the other cases of HN comments complaining about bad scrolling performance in Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1250947

Bad link, I'm afraid... It's about a box-shadow glitch.

It's the correct link (if you read the last 15 or so comments, it'll be more obvious that there is a performance component to the issue).

It seems you're correct. Specifically, disabling this rule from the inspector instantly fixes the performance issue.

  .widewrapper.main {
    box-shadow: inset 1px 3px 1px -2px #ababab;
  }

I loaded this in Firefox on a Raspberry Pi 3 (don't ask), and never got to see below the fold--burned CPU for a minute or two before I gave up and closed it. I had pressed page-down once--don't know if it ever got around to processing the scroll event.

Don't know the root cause, but the worst most sites get on here is annoyingly sluggish. Between the site and Firefox, something's definitely triggering pathological behavior.

Wow, it is indeed slow on Firefox! Thanks for letting us know, we both test on Chrome so we didn't notice the problem. We'll look into it.

As a workaround you can go to "View > Page Style > No style". It honestly reads just fine without CSS.

Or use the reader view.

Same for me; 46.0.1 windows 7 (if authors care to reproduce).

Page pinwheels on load for me (FF 46.0.1), OSX

Reply on news.ycombinator.com