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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently trying out FF57 with the TreeStyleTab plugin and css fix. I switched to Vivaldi a while back, mainly due to performance issues.

Vivaldi was faster, but has a lot odd bugs, it's not OSS, and has no real public bug tracker.

After some recent UI lockups, I decided to try FF57 again. Most of the extensions I use have been ported, but after just a day or two, I started to hit real performance issues again. I'm not ready to give up on FF yet, but I do feel like many of the performance improvements might have been overrated.

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> I started to hit real performance issues again

What would help is to activate the Gecko profiler[1] when the performance issues occur. The cause of these performance issues might not be in Firefox itself, and the Gecko profiler would allow to find out where is the issue.

[1] https://perf-html.io/

If you're looking for performance, don't go with Vivaldi, at least if you use many tabs.

With many tabs (>= 100 or so), it becomes really sluggish. For example, opening a link in a new tab can take approximately five seconds. Chrome, which it is based on, does not have this issue. Chrome is however unusable (with many tabs) for other reasons (lack of lazy loaded tabs essentially causing a DoS for many minutes when starting it, at least on Windows).

Shameless plug: try https://cretz.github.io/doogie/ which is my Chromium-based browser with trees. It is not the most mature thing out there, but I use it for most things. But geez, that process-per-tab of Chromium approach can really blow up your memory.

If you can get LastPass support this becomes a real option for me! I also like gmail notifications but I can always get that elsewhere.

Not 100+ tabs, but I experience no performance issues at all at ~60 tabs, which is kind of too much already.

the FF 57 team would say that you should check about:performance, and then report a bug if there are consistent perf issues.

Wow, I hadn't seen about:performance before, it's pretty nice.

Most of the extensions I use have been ported, but after just a day or two, I started to hit real performance issues again.

Maybe the answer is contained in this statement?

uBlock Origin, TreeStyleTabs, Reddit Enhancement Suit (I should just disable that; stopped using Reddit after their CEO edited comments and their warrant canary got removed), Open In Browser and Mega.

Only thee of those are active on more than one website. If Web Extensions are suppose to be this great improvement for security and performance, extensions themselves shouldn't matter, or should at least show up in about:performance if there are issues.

Despite being one of the best adblockers, uBO is a small but noticeable performance hit to me- it's still worth it though. Nature of the beast I suspect.

Can you be more specific about "noticeable performance hit"? A whole lot of work has been done to avoid "noticeable performance hit", so I would be curious about a reproducible case for this to find out the cause.

Hey, you are the developer aren't you :)

I will attempt to come up with a test case. Mostly I just noticed when resetting Firefox or with a new install, "hey this is snappier than usual" until I install uBO. Not sure if it's resources, UI responsiveness, or rendering speed. uBO is awesome, and I appreciate all the work.

I thought you had hard data backing up your claim. Frankly I am quite skeptical at any unspecific "noticeable performance hit" claim. uBO's overhead is typically in the low milliseconds range, which amount to noise-level overhead really when compared to everything else occurring at page download/rendering time.

See https://twitter.com/adildean/status/936183316134416384

Well, I went straight to Facebook as it's got a lot of ads, and disabling uBO does appear to speed up the "long tail" load of FB.

I'm not complaining, and if you're confident in your overhead times feel free to disregard. Just unscientific observations. I still love uBO and use it across the board.

I did the same thing. I gave FF about a week before I got frustrated and went back to Chrome. FF is still noticeably slower in terms of basic UI actions (opening/closing tabs, menus, etc.) and every hour or so it would start hammering my CPUs. I don't know why.

Have you looked at about:performance and also when you hit this, then create a perf profile using https://perf-html.io/ and submit it as a bug to bugzilla.mozilla.org. If possible do both using Nightly. In my experience the developers are very(!) welcome to good bug reports.

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