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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

may be, or may be not. However, does it really matter how long the browser takes to start when you don't ever really close the browser (but only the tabs)?

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As someone that likes the stated Mozilla mission and always wished them the best, I unfortunately have to agree with /BrailleHunting about Firefox performance on Mac OS.

Not only does FF take a while to start up but when it is loading a mildly heavy page or even after updating, it can freeze up for several (as in 10-20) seconds.

Damn. I tried switching back to Firefox with the assumption that these issues were fixed. After using it for the past few days, it really 'felt' dog-slow, but I assumed it was just prejudice on my end :-/.

Huh. Doesn't happen to me. I'd suggest using about:memory to see if you have a leaky tab. In my case, it used to be that my FB and Twitter tabs both leaked a lot. I stopped leaving Twitter open and FB (or Firefox) seems to have fixed their problem.

Yeah, I tried that. the about:memory usage reported is much lower (and strikes me as more reasonable).

I use an unload tab extension so currently there should be no 'open' tabs. Memory usage is at 1.5Gb though. It doesn't seem to go much higher or lower, though, so could it be that FF just takes/keeps the RAM it can get and doesn't bother to unload stuff?

It's also true that my MacBook has become slower in general since I updated to the latest MacOS, so perhaps it's not FF fault. Still, very annoying.

A bowser isn't a Sun box. In the real world, browsers and computers restart occasionally. Also, opening a new tab in FF hangs everything for several seconds whereas in Chrome and Safari it's still responsive. It's like FF is doing everything on the main event queue synchronously.

Numbers. Even with a top-tier SSD and 16 GiB of fast RAM starting cold (with minimal, necessary plugins):

FF: 25s

Safari: 13s

Chrome: 8s

Without plugins, hot restart (absolutely worthless):

FF: 5s

Safari: 3s

Chrome: 2s

Using FF UX is like replacing an SSD with an HDD.

FF has a nice mission, but it doesn't matter if it's not better than the others, which includes both being usable and fast, in addition to privacy and security.

Conclusion: FF is nice in theory, but not currently usable in practice unless you enjoy wasting your time.

I mean, I have my browser and computer restart one 1-2 times a day, and I'd still prefer 25 seconds of startup vs losing functionality like close tabs to the right. I routinely end up with windows with 20-40 tabs when I'm researching an issue and will want to close all but a handful when I've found the information I need. Other people definitely use browsers differently than me, but it's FF is not useless in practice for everyone

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