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Comment by sjroot | Hacker News Reader

What version of Firefox are you running? You are either exaggerating greatly or have other issues with your system. I run the latest stable release of Firefox and the performance of Gmail (particularly the features you mention) is fine. I’d be happy to upload a screen recording to verify.

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He's not the only one. It's a recurring comment here on hacker news and a problem I've encountered as well, and I'm running the latest stable release.

Same here, I run the latest Firefox on both Windows and Linux. Gmail always takes at least 5 seconds to load.

If you experience a reproducible Firefox performance problem, please consider using the Firefox profiler add-on [1] to record a profile and file a bug with "[qf]" to the whiteboard field. These "[qf]" Firefox performance bugs get reviewed by engineers twice a week. Having a profile makes the bugs much easier to diagnose.

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

I think that Chrome also suffers on this front? But it's better at doing pre-fetching than Firefox is

This could really just be that part. I have a hard time imagining explicit sabotage of FF on the gmail frontend. The likeliest explanation is that perf testing and the like only happens in Chrome

The classic question to ask at this point is whether this affects you with a fresh install, or only once you have added all your extensions?

Firefox 63.0. Fibre internet connection. 3.1 GHz Mac, 16 GB RAM.

It's tricky to share a screen recording because there's personal information. But I just did two for my own curiosity. From a fresh load, once the "Loading Gmail" screen has gone away, it took 8 seconds and 11 seconds respectively from clicking 'Compose' to having a new window open.

Maybe there is variability. There are a million combinations of factors out there. I suppose as an engineer you make the trade off of "do I hope for the best case" vs "do I make something that works for a broad audience". The previous version shows that they can make something that works for my own anecdatapoint if they want to.

I have a lot of issues with google apps for business. Sometimes I have to refresh the browser 5-6 times before it will display any email in the primary inbox as well.

It's just horrible to use in firefox (in arch linux) and I'm currently looking for a new provider.

I might just go all in and use protonmail.

Protonmail is great but doesnt offer custom domains. If you need domains people mostly mention fastmail but i think there are far better choices like mailbox.org and kolabnow. Mailbox does not look like much from their homepage but it has awesome web client and it extremly reliable private provider thats in bussiness from 90s. I had account there for last 5 years without single problem.

This is actually not quite right, we have offered custom domain support since 2016 :)

https://protonmail.com/support/knowledge-base/custom-domain-...

I've experienced both very fast and very slow with the new Gmail on the same machine with Firefox on Linux. It's currently faster than Chromium, but maybe tomorrow I'll see ten-second load times. Who knows? For the record, I use uMatrix (and uBlock Origin on easy mode for client-side cleanup), which might be affecting it somewhat.

>and the performance of Gmail (particularly the features you mention) is fine

>ten seconds to load your inbox

>16 GB, i7, SSD, 100 MB/s internet etc.

>fine

Exactly what I was thinking. How is that even close to fine? WTF?

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