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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.

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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.

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