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Comment by ArmandGrillet | Hacker News Reader

I just installed Firefox 57 (thanks jacek for the link) and the first things I noticed are:

- The cross to close a tab and the one to create a tab are aligned in a weird way.

- Opening a tab is laggy (I'm on a MBP with an Intel Iris chip and 16GB of RAM).

- The scrolling still does not feel native (I'm on macOS High Sierra).

I'm very impressed by the work that has been done for this release as a dev but this does not give me a great first impression as a user (I haven't used Firefox these past 5 years). Google Chrome since its Material UI redesign (https://medium.com/google-design/redesigning-chrome-desktop-...) is snappy and has a clean UI, I hope that Firefox will also reach this point.

Anyway, this release is a major achievement. Congrats to the contributors!

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It also feels laggy to me. It's weird given the reports of all these other users. I am also using a 16GB Ram, Intel Iris MBP. There is a noticeable pause while switching tabs, and there is a very noticeable lag while typing (for example in this box). Pages do seem to render fast, but it feels very laggy in terms of user interaction.

Edit: The scrolling is also very laggy, which I forgot to mention, much more so than Chrome.

Check about:support and look for a number higher than 0 in the "Multiprocess Windows" entry. Old extensions or something may be keeping you from running multi-process.

I have a 1/1 there, and the only extension I have loaded is the new version of Tree Style Tabs.

> Edit: The scrolling is also very laggy, which I forgot to mention, much more so than Chrome.

Firefox uses smooth scrolling, while Chrome always uses very jerky, jumping scrolling.

Have you tried disabling that?

I use a magic trackpad for scrolling and the delay before scrolling is there in either case, but it was off.

FYI, Chrome has had smooth scrolling since v49. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/02/smooth-scr...

I haven’t had any lag in text entry, but I ran the Windows version for a while (making sure I gave it plenty of time to build up a cache) and my general perception is that Chrome is still faster.

I like the idea of switching to Firefox a lot, but from a performance perspective I’m not seeing quite what everyone else is.

The typing lag put me off immediately.

I've measured the input latency and its ~3x slower than chrome.

Filed a bug around a month ago https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1408699

If you set your screen resolution to "default for display" in System Preferences, does the scrolling feel closer to native?

This seems to have fixed it for me! Not that I could actually live with this fix, but now I could report it to them or something. When I turned it to default scaling it was snappy again. And when I move the window over to one of my 4K monitors it is also fast, so it's something unique to the laptop monitor with scaling.

The scrolling thing is a real shame, and it’s shocking to me that they haven’t implemented bouncy overscrolling when macOS has had it for something like 6 years.

Not sure why people were downvoting you. It's literally the only app on my machine that doesn't do this, and it is probably the #1 reason I don't want to switch to it. It's a major usability penalty for some macOS users.

That's weird, Firefox feels much snappier than Chrome to me. It also uses significantly less memory.

Latest one seems like it has a memory leak on linux. Starts off fast, but I've found that I need to close out all of Firefox about once a day. Not sure if that's the vanilla build, or the multi-account containers extension that's causing the issue.

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