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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

I switched to Firefox from Chrome about 12 months ago. It isn't as good as Chrome, but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies.

It has been mostly fine (except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing).

I was really looking forward to this feature to help close the gap on Chrome performance.

Until August (I think Firefox 48.x), when it became unusable on any site with... something. I'm not entirely sure what triggers it- I don't think it is just video alone. Something make the entire browser lock up entirely for minutes, and sometimes it even runs out of memory and I have to kill it via the OS.

No add-ins (except for Firebug).

Frustratingly, I can't replicate it well enough to be a useful bug report.

I'm this close to switching back. Muscle memory and shortcuts to Firefox is the only thing stopping me.

So.. this will be great, but please make it a workable browser.

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I've found Firefox performance to be absolutely awful at work on OS X. I have no issues at all with it at home on Linux, and didn't have any issues in my previous job on OS X either. I'm not sure if it's OS X specific, a change in recent versions, this laptop being underpowered, or the nature of the work I do (a lot of video stuff), but anything JS heavy severely slows down or locks up the browser. And if anything, it's gotten worse over the last few months.

I have to use Chrome for anything video related or JS heavy (monitoring/graphing stuff for the most part), but I'd hate to switch to it for everything. There are too many addons that I rely on in Firefox, on top of my general dislike for Chrome's minimalist UI and standard Google privacy concerns.

I've tried turning on the config option for electrolysis, but it breaks some addons, so that's still a no go for me for now.

Any chance you could file bugs, particularly on the JS-related performance issues? I'm looking into some similar things right now, but seemingly JS-centric things seem to have a tendency to actually be from something else. It'd be nice to have something I could solidly blame on JS. If you file a bug with https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&comp... and make it block bug 1299643, I'll see it.

For a while now I've suspected that memory management on OS X is actually terrible. I have no really proof, because I just run everything memory intensive on Linux. At work I have a few Python script that eats a few gigabytes of memory, it reads in data, and basically just loops over it, selects the stuff it needs an generate a few XML file (10 to 20MB worth of XML).

All this takes maybe five minutes on Linux, on Mac OS X it will freeze the OS for long periods of time and take 40 minutes to run. In terms of hardware, the Linux box has less RAM, CPU and slower discs.

Regarding the Javascript stuff: Part of it may be that Chrome is the new Internet Explorer. People develop on and test for Chrome (because everyone uses Chrome, right?). Chrome does have the better Javascript engine, still, I believe that much of the slow Javascript on Firefox (an other browsers) could be avoided if people bothered testing a little more.

    Chrome does have the better Javascript engine, still, I believe that much of the slow Javascript on Firefox (an other browsers) could be avoided if people bothered testing a little more.

All major engines are pretty much comparable speed-wise. The biggest difference is probably in memory management (of the HTML & JS engines), which may favor some forms of site/lib structure and architecture over others – that's IMHO where the majority of slowness comes from (for any browser).

I've actually had the opposite experience. I work on Firefox support for a very heavy Angular2 app, and I usually see 2-3x faster reflows on OS X (and Windows) than on Linux, and faster paints too (although I haven't taken exact numbers, since reflows are the bottleneck). It seems that at least the graphics pipeline is much better optimized for OS X/Windows than Linux.

This is definitely true when it comes to graphics, linux is the redheaded step child when it comes to the graphics stack.

Afaik firefox still doesn't have OpenGL accelerated compositing (at least not enabled in stable builds yet) on linux

On OSX and Windows it has hardware accelerated compositing, video decoding, canvas etc...

I don't know whether it has accelerated compositing, but in my experience compositing is relatively cheap compared to painting the layers or especially layout. That may be an artifact of the app I work on being poorly composited, however.

It's really hit-or-miss for me too. On my work laptop for example, it would freeze up for multiple seconds with e10s enabled but was fine with it disabled. Then one day everything worked fine. On my home computer FF is just getting slower and slower. I'm not looking for troubleshooting tips here, just mentioning that the experience is very uneven.

Do you get the same problem if you temporarily disable your addons? It could be a bug in one of them rather than Firefox.

>>I've found Firefox performance to be absolutely awful at work on OS X.

Safari is the only logical choice on OS X laptops, at least. Everything else just eats up the battery like crazy.

I've thought exactly the same.

Firebug?

Firebug is quite often the culprit in these kinds of things in my experience. I can't live without it so I put up with it; if you're switching from Chrome however, it seems that you'd be better off just using the built-in inspection.

Yes. I don't know if this is still the case, but Firebug used to disable SpiderMonkey's JIT, even when not using Firebug:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/firebug/q2fuUraVDk8

Have you given the built-in Firefox dev tools a try? If so, what did you feel was missing?

Really just that I've used Firebug for so long that using anything else is painful. I've tried switching but always ended up going back. Much of it is interface differences, but some of it is actual differences in functionality: if Firebug has something which another inspector does not, then it's super-frustrating. If another inspector has something that Firebug lacks, then I don't even notice.

Edit: I should emphasize that I'm not saying Firebug is superior, just that I'm used to it.

PSA: The Firebug you know (version 2) is incompatible to e10s and there will be no e10s-compatible Firebug 3. Instead, Firebug.next is built-into Firefox(!):

https://blog.getfirebug.com/2016/06/07/unifying-firebug-fire...

Though you're used to Firebug and find it convenient, it might be worth looking at something else once in a while to see what else is out there (especially if you're not using addons on top of Firebug to enhance it). Perhaps you could have a look at Firefox Developer Edition and try it. [1]

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/Firefox/Developer_Edition

I would really miss the DOM tab of Firebug. You can explorer the DOM state which is very useful. Non of the other DevTools anywhere has that feature to my knowlegde.

Also worth pointing out that the built in tools have a Firebug theme in the settings.

> No add-ins (except for Firebug).

You might want to try Firefox's built-in Web Console. I switched a year or two ago when it was less powerful than Firebug, but notably more stable, and I haven't gone back since.

> except for an annoying OS-X multi-screen bug where it screws up the sizing

Can't argue with you there. At last exiting full-screen video no longer takes the entire browser out of full-screen.

>You might want to try Firefox's built-in Web Console

Maybe it's a personal thing, but I much prefer the built in developer tools on Firefox to that of Chrome.

I've been a long time Firefox user (due to multi-row tab extension -- can't live without it). I can easily have 120 tabs open when doing research. Firefox has always been relatively performant even with that huge number of tabs visible and I almost never have to close it.

However, something recently has changed. Firefox will work fine and then something will cause it use a large amount of CPU that it doesn't let go of even after closing all the tabs. I have to close the whole browser and re-open it. This can happen a few times a day.

I'm hoping it's a regression that will be fixed soon.

> I've been a long time Firefox user (due to multi-row tab extension -- can't live without it).

Which one do you use? There are several.

I can suggest a few for tab management:

Tab Mix Plus [1]

TooManyTabs [2]

Tree Style Tab [3]

Use one or more of these with the Session Manager [4] extension and life becomes a lot easier with several hundreds of tabs. I highly recommend looking at the configuration options provided by each of these extensions and adapting them to how you'd like them to behave. Some of these are also developed with compatibility with the other extensions in mind.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/

[2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/toomanytabs-saves-y...

[3]: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/

[4]: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/session-manager/

Thanks but even though I tend to overload, I try not to install more then one addon for one purpose. It's a mess already ;)

Tab mix plus

Thank you

I have this exact same problem, in fact I could have written your comment word-for-word. I also cannot reproduce it reliably, but it started in August.

I also switched from Chrome, but for slightly different reasons...I got to thinking about Google, and Chrome,and ad-blocking, and it occurred to me that Chrome will probably never allow extensions on Android, not because it's technically not possible, but because ad-blocking is bad for business (if your business is showing ads).

How does the Chrome team reconcile this? We know that ads are annoying, and ads can track you, and some ads can even be malicious. It seems that blocking ads make a browser better. But the Chrome team is not allowed to block ads on Android, so they are purposefully making a worse mobile browser.

Anyway, I do a lot of surfing at night in bed on my Android tablet, and I'm going to stick with Firefox.

Based on CAF Chromium, with integrated ad-blocker and DuckDuckGo as an search option : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mokee.yubr...

interesting...does this really sync with your Google account / bookmarks?

Yeah, works fine. It did clear the password storage at initial sync, don't know if this was because of Chrome to Chromium switch, but I wasn't bothered since I use a password manager anyway and was planning to clear the passwords. Sync works as the normal Chrome one.

You can get Chromium for desktop with sync and codecs as well : https://github.com/henrypp/chrlauncher

Just an update - I did the "refresh profile" thing suggested here, and I've been 2 days without lock-ups.

This seems atypical. Given that you don't use any add-ons, consider resetting your profile. Alternatively, you may wish to disable multi-process for the time being if it's enabled for you (I'm sure there's a flag you can set for that if you Google for it), or upgrade to the beta or alpha builds. In my experience, the beta/alpha builds are usually plenty stable to be a daily driver.

To reset go to about:support and click on the button in the top right. A prompt will appear telling you what it’s going to do.

I second that. My FF on Linux acted weirdly, then I removed the whole .mozilla directory (remembered to save the greasemonkey scripts I wrote, but forgot to save the favorite links :( ) and everything worked again.

Firefox is frustratingly slow for me. I can't use it, have to stick to Chrome. Chrome which, by the way, crashes after 5 minutes of using video Hangouts and brings my 16 gigabytes ram PC to a halt when I open too many youtube tabs.

But firefox scrolling is especially slow. irccloud.com is the main culprit (and I use irccloud a lot). It's pretty bad in gmail as well.

The react app my team is working on is also far slower in Firefox. Try scrolling this in Firefox and Chrome and see the difference (the scrubber is at the bottom of the blue area, like a video). Butter smooth in Chrome, horribly slow in Firefox: https://hsreplay.net/replay/7VAKLeMNaXvshAawnUUoni

This is super surprising to me, because irccloud is exactly what we use at Mozilla. Everyone seems happy with it's performance, and obviously most people are using FF.

If it helps, I'm running irccloud's "Ash" theme, with the sidebar on the left, monospace font, "nicknames on a separate line", "user icons" and colored nicknames all enabled.

It's pretty bad on both Windows 10 and Arch Linux (different computers). Worse on Windows, actually, but only after some time -- I'm in ~30 channels, fwiw.

As always it's probably a plugin. You could integrate the functionality of plugins which everybody uses, such as an adblocker (Instead of pocket? You are already doing it with the developer tools) -- but you get all your money from Google...

Tracking Protection is pretty much an ad-blocker. It's default-enabled in Private Browsing and you can enable in normal browsing, too, by setting "privacy.trackingprotection.enabled" in about:config to true.

Scrolling especially should be much better in multi-process Firefox, because it will be async, so web pages no longer block it.

It doesn't fix performance in your react app, though. I've filed a bug about it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1300848

That last link looks about the same to me in Chrome dev and Firefox nightly, for what it's worth.

It's 5-10 fps in Firefox Nightly for me, and 50-60 fps in Chrome Canary, on OS X.

OK. They're both about 20fps or so for me (at least eyeballing it).

Mind filing the bug, since you can reproduce and profile?

Edit: mstange did in fact file one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1300848

How do you measure fps? Is there an add-on for that?

In Firefox go to about:config and flip layers.acceleration.draw-fps to true. In Chrome I think it’s either in dev tools settings or in chrome://flags

Dragging the scrubber around updates at the same speed, really? I'm not on Nightly, maybe that's the difference, but if that's the case that's great news.

Do you have the latest graphics drivers? Some are really buggy and may be (one of) the cause(s).

I can't find any other reports of it, but I was on FF 47.0.1 on Windows 7 and upgraded to 48.0.1 (For some reason I never upgrade when prompted on the XX.0 releases). And I would have intermittent whole-browser freezes that lasted about a minute. Not like one every 4 hours, but more like once every 5~10 minutes. Back down to 47.0.1.

I tried again on 48.0.2, ... same thing.

I can't nail it down specifically enough to file a proper issue report, so I guess I'll keep trying when the next releases come out.

I also notice that webapps seem to like Chrome better, but FF usually performs "well enough" that I've put up with it because I find it (for me) to be markedly better at helping me deal with the ginormous amounts of text content I apparently consume. But webapps have been degraded enough for the last month-or-so that I'm running chrome in parallel just for those.

I love FF and I'm hoping that this is one of those isolated things that the fabulous team over there fixes before too long. (I suspect it's a JS related something or other, but I haven't been able to track it down specifically.)

(Wow. Now there is a rambling comment!)

Chrome became really really really slow on Ubuntu in the past year, no extensions installed. Every time I use it on a high-end Core M ultrabook, the CPU/RAM is eaten, the whole system becomes laggy, Google Hangout/Slack voice chat/Skype gets interrupted all the time etc. Not sure if you gain anything by moving back, sadly :(

chrome on linux doesn't seem to get much attention for quite a while now: got affected by this [1] more than 2 years ago and been quite happy with firefox for surfing & dev ever since

[1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=393395...

I found ads to be a major hog (and some bad scrolling scripts on popular or design-y sites). I'm using uBlock Origin or Adblock Plus, which gives a great responsiveness boost for far too many websites.

Did you try updating your graphics driver or disabling hardware acceleration (about:preferences#advanced)?

I had an issue but on Windows 10 where sometimes on video playback FF would just lock up and windows would restart the graphics driver. I also couldn't reliably reproduce it, it sounds like a similar problem.

This is my bug report: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280706

Firefox has been painfully slower than Chrome by great magnitudes for me on a cheap Dell Windows laptop. I have almost identical extensions except for NoScript which might be the culprit, although it is also the main reason why I use FF over Chrome (and for enabled extensions on private mode, which defeats the purpose of private mode but it has been used more as a "don't save history" mode than private mode if you know what I mean).

Did you try updating your graphics drivers? Sometimes bad drivers cause sluggishness.

you can enable extensions for incognito in chrome too.

I occasionally experience similar slowness. In my case, it's caused by bloated sqlite database. After I delete all history, the browser is snappy again.

It is frustrating that Firefox makes it so easy to delete recent history, but difficult to remove old stuff. I really only want the last month or so; why do I have to clear it manually?

Mind filing a bug with specifics at bugzilla.mozilla.org? There's probably some low-hanging fruit there …

I would, but just recently purged all my history, so I don't have a reference about database size and number of entries. That means I can't include any constructive data in the bug report.

> but I was trying to reduce my Google dependencies.

Get Chromium.

http://chromium.woolyss.com/

Chromium would be great if it had a decent library of extensions like Firefox. As is, I'll stick with the latter.

Which extensions namely? Chromium does support all the same extensions as Chrome does.

Also make sure you've got the Google services turned off in Settings/Privacy.

It's tedious but I'd do some basic troubleshooting like embargo all addons, not merely disable, and trash the user prefs. If you use sync with a Firefox account, it'll have your history and bookmarks. Then add back add ons one at a time. I'm on 48.0.1 on Linux (on a Mac!) and I'm not having the problems you're describing.

Funny, I have the same lockups with Chrome. Middle-clicking a new link (to open in a new tab) freezes the entire browser (all tabs) until the new tab is done loading. I believe it's a extension problem (uBlock Origin, EFF Privacy Badger), but I don't really want to get rid of any of them.

I know this is not about ad blockers, but does anybody have any experience of using something like https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/blob/master/hosts instead of uBlock Origin? Or even use it in the hosts file of our dd-wrt/openwrt routers?

I use something similar, and love it. Still get blocked by Forbes and similar for using an ad blocker (it's a network issue, you dolts!), but the performance gains in all browsers is well worth the few exceptions.

I use a similar solution and I love it. It works on every app and requires no browser add-ons. I use a list from this ancient looking website: http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

I wish I could use this on my phone.

EDIT: Looks like I should switch to the https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts source, as it includes the one I referenced plus a lot more.

I have the same problem in Windows 10, since a month or two (I think since v48) something seems to be broken... Sometimes the browser will freeze or some sites take too long to load properly...

For me, disabling JS by default was the culprit. I only turn it on for sites that actually need it, and it seems to work much better. YMMV of course

NoScript allows you to turn it off/on by domain.

I haven't used that in a while, but I remember liking it. I've moved to umatrix

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