Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com