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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I think I qualify as a poweruser by some standards, I tend to have 100's of tabs open and I've never left Firefox for speed reasons or others because it has held up extremely well over the years. My machine has a lot of RAM so maybe that's one reason things have been quick, and the main drive is an SSD. Is there anything specific about the 57 release that makes you feel caused the speed bottle-neck to disappear?

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57 is lightning fast. Like, almost uncomfortably so on my machine.

Broay this is because quantum is much further along in nightly than on the other channels. Specifically, they're more aggressive with multithreaded settings, multiprocess is enabled, and the quantum css component is turned on, too.

Is also helps that we compare to chrome. On Linux chrome doesn't even do GPU rendering. So the HN crowd probably has a disproportionately bad experience with it

> 57 is lightning fast. Like, almost uncomfortably so on my machine.

I thought you were overstating it but I just tried it out and you're right, it's crazy fast.

> 57 is lightning fast. Like, almost uncomfortably so on my machine

As others have said here, I just installed Firefox Nightly after reading this, and you're 100% correct. I think it might even be faster than Chromium for me.

Wait, what? I know that hw accelerated video decoding is generally not available on linux chrome, but I'm pretty sure that lots of other things are. From my chrome://gpu

    Canvas: Hardware accelerated
    CheckerImaging: Disabled
    Flash: Hardware accelerated
    Flash Stage3D: Hardware accelerated
    Flash Stage3D Baseline profile: Hardware accelerated
    Compositing: Hardware accelerated
    Multiple Raster Threads: Enabled
    Native GpuMemoryBuffers: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
    Rasterization: Software only. Hardware acceleration disabled
    Video Decode: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
    Video Encode: Software only, hardware acceleration unavailable
    WebGL: Hardware accelerated
    WebGL2: Hardware accelerated

But this is with an integrated GPU, so maybe things are different for discrete cards.

Firefox has always been unbearably slow on Linux for me. It's the main reason I swapped to Chrome in the first place. I tried switching back to Firefox about 6 months ago, same problem of extremely slow and laggy UI. Interesting to hear 57 is faster now, it may be worth trying again.

Do you have any extensions installed?

Have you tried using a fresh profile, just to narrow the possible variables?

If you've checked both of those things, and you can characterize the slowness in the context of specific operations (e.g. what "laggy" means, precisely), then I'd recommend filing a bug and working with the developers to track down the problem. Because that is not normal.

Also, current Firefox has `about:performance`, where you can diagnose what addons and tabs can be slowing down the browser. It's quite neat.

I just refreshed my profile and performance improved immensely.

Go to about:config and set layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true. Made a dramatic difference for me in Linux using a Intel iGPU.

You can check the acceleration status in about:support, look at HW_COMPOSITING and OPENGL_COMPOSITING.

Firefox 57 should be a much, much improved experience. e10s with multiple processes started rolling out to users in Firefox 54 and tons of small performance issues have been fixed in 55-57.

On Linux, manually enabling GPU acceleration as user ac29 describes below can a big difference. Unfortunately, a lot of Linux GPU drivers have issues that prevent acceleration from being enabled by default for some users.

Same here, it's why I switched to Vivaldi. I had to restart Firefox every day or so and it still lagged. I've read the other recent post on here that shows 100+ tabs has almost no startup burden in FF57 compared to previous builds. I should try it again.

Here's an in-depth article on Firefox 57 and all the big changes:

https://www.cnet.com/special-reports/mozilla-firefox-fights-...

This article is good but the annoying div that covers your mobile browser when you are in landscape, is not!

OMG. Why do they do that?

has cnet always been this bad? I mean you need JS to read the thing

and the whole article is on a floating div?

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