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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Slightly off topic, I'm finding it very disingenuous that people in this thread(and any other threads that come up about Firefox) have actually had significant performance issues with Firefox. No bugs that are noteworthy, sans that fiasco with the expired certificate that disabled addons briefly.

I've been using Firefox since "quantum" on both my MacBooks(one of which is old AF) and on Linux. I've yet to have problems playing video, streaming, or anything of the sort. I keep tons of tabs open. I just can't really say anything wrong about Firefox at this point.

It was once the case that Firefox had significant disadvantages in contrast to Chrome, but now the only reason I have to still keep Chrome installed is when work forces me to use some Google-proprietary page that doesn't work in other browsers.

If you had problems with Firefox 2 years ago, try it again before bringing up performance when people are considering it as an alternative to deleting Chrome. The more people who uninstall Chrome, the better.

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"Disingenuous" has become a way of insinuating astroturfing, which the guidelines ask HN users to refrain from. Please don't do that here. If you have better information than other users, that's great, but please simply provide it, so we all can learn. Attacking the other users' integrity poisons the well, and is mostly a cheap side-effect of the irritation we all feel when encountering views we disagree with.

Real astroturfing exists, of course, but is far rarer than insinuation. If you or anyone are genuinely concerned you might be seeing it, email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Firefox has significant performance and correctness problems.

* Multi-second UI jank/freeze (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1546847)

* HTTP2 is broken, infinite-stalls and internal errors surface if you upload enough files (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1540574)

* WebGL is very slow on Linux (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1010527)

* High CPU on Linux even when in the background, possibly due to frequent polling (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=508427)

These are just a few issues that I'm directly involved in and suffer from every day, and into which I've sunk over 100 hours profiling and reading code of, simply because they make it an absolute pain to use.

Thank you for your work in helping profile FF's issues.

The first issue was really enjoyable to read. A high quality bug report and the devs giving feedback.

Why did you reference that last issue? I haven't had that CPU usage issue since Quantum was released.

> Why did you reference that last issue?

Because it's still happening, also on Quantum. I still see the 5-15% CPU usage on idle. If you strace Firefox, you'll see the syscall spam, even when the browser is apparently fully idle. This consumes a lot of battery power because it prevents the CPU going to sleep, even when you're looking at a still screen in Firefox (compare to gnome-terminal as mentioned in the bug report, which stops spamming as soon as nothing moves).

My laptop lasts only half as long on battery when Firefox is on and showing a still screen.

I can confirm the strace messages and FF's 15% erratic usage on a dual core i3 Skylake laptop.

I guess I never noticed it compared to how FF used to chug after long use and Google Chrome's same usage of around 30-40% of my cores.

Firefox also has bad input lag compared to chrome, everywhere from the address bar to basic textareas.

I've filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1408699 quite a while ago with some measurements. Sadly, no progress so far.

Can confirm. For me also sometimes input "buffers up", not showing up for over a second, and then appearing at once. I attribute most of that to the first bug in my list for now, as it freezes everything.

I've certainly had something equivalent to the first one in Chrome frequently, seemingly when it's waiting for an unresponsive child process, often when closing a tab. It won't lock up as the UI seems to be separated from the other processes well enough to allow it to keep rendering loading animations etc. However every part of the browser will stop functioning including showing any tab content or opening any menu, for 10s of seconds at a time.

I've also had Chrome destroy my browser profile completely many times. It will start up and say something like 'your profile was unrecoverably corrupted and has been deleted'

Both are very complex pieces of software with lots of bugs.

I wonder if Chrome is using Sqlite under the hood, I know Electron apps will lose their data entirely if any bit of the database is corrupt (Sqlite doesn't handle inconsistent states well :c).

On a slightly different tangent, you likely have a failing disk or RAM.

Yep, certainly possible. I think Firefox avoids this by keeping a few complete profile backups to fall back on.

I can confirm both.

Often, closing a tab in Chromium simply does nothing.

Chromium has lost my tabs multiple times (not by profile corruption, but not restoring them on startup). Firefox hasn't lost my tabs for over 10 years -- one big reason I use it (it did lose them ~5 times but I could always restore them from the backup file in the profile directory).

> High CPU on Linux

Provided this is anecdotal evidence, in my experience it's the opposite. I gained an enormous amount of performance-related comfort after switching to Linux Firefox from Windows Firefox/Chrome (where a JS-heavy web site that I use frequently would cause memory overflow and would stall the laptop). I've not experienced any problems with CPU usage since. I've not experienced the other problems either, though I don't use WebGL. You make it sound like Firefox is heavily broken for everyone. That's not the case.

I can't really speak to the Windows (FF/Chrome) -> Linux (FF) switch, but I have seen so many Windows setups that 100%-CPU-loop for unknown (likely browser unrelated) reasons that I would not be surprised if people considered switching to what I experience now a major improvement :)

> You make it sound like Firefox is heavily broken for everyone. That's not the case.

I didn't say it's unusable. But these things matter. If you get constantly annoyed by such things and you know that with Chromium this annoyance would stop, it is no surprise people use Chromium a lot and claim it's "faster". If we want them to be happy Firefox users, this has to be fixed.

I’m guessing most people don’t suffer from the first issue because they don’t have 800 tabs open? The bug reports were very nicely done, however.

I’d recommend using bookmarks instead of keeping tabs open and unloaded, but I do think that insane numbers of tabs should be something that Firefox can handle.

I use OneTab[1] for Firefox for this. Bookmarks do have the advantage of being integrated to sync though.

[1] https://www.one-tab.com/

> 800 tabs

As you commented, most of them are unloaded and only 10-20 are actually "real tabs". Have also tested with less by now, same problem.

On Chrome on Android I have more tabs, 16x less RAM and 50x less CPU power, and it doesn't jank at all, so this seems solvable.

I've had a few instances of firefox on Mac and Linux starting to spin up the fans, and show high CPU usage, and I've had trouble pinning down which tab was causing it.

Is about:performance the best place to do this or is there something like Chrome's task manager that shows CPU and memory usage per page, and per extension?

I just switched to Firefox today after a few years hiatus, and I agree that it is hugely improved, and rendering speed is at least on part with Chrome if not faster. They've done a great job with it, and the dev tools seem greatly improved in the developer edition as well.

The issue I have with firefox on both Linux and Windows is not speed, but stability. I think it's the process model. Windows freeze if I open too many tabs, and is an issue I've not really had much with Chrome (though it had its own issues). I've noticed it a few times today as well. I wonder if that's the speed issues people are describing?

With that said, removal of ad blocking is a deal breaker for me and Chrome will no longer be my default browser.

How many tabs do you consider to be too many tabs? Most of the time I open up to 10 tabs, and Firefox is performing fine. But I have also seen people opening 40 tabs.

At home I have like 60+ tabs open. And at work I have > 100. Firefox is pretty rock solid now with many tabs on windows. Chrome can’t cope with that. Or it couldn’t a year ago when I switched to Firefox. The tabs are mostly blogs and things I’m slowly reading or such. I just open more than I close :(

I sometimes have hundreds of tabs open (Firefox on Windows), and a feature that I'll leverage if things start chugging is that, upon starting, Firefox will only load the contents of a tab if you put focus on the tab. So if I open a ludicrous number of tabs, I can quickly restart Firefox (just timed it; took six seconds) and all the tabs but the one that last had focus will be unloaded. I believe they're working on making this more automatic by actively unloading tabs if certain criteria have been met, but no convenient heuristic here is ever going to be as outright effective as this. As a tab addict, I can live with it. :P

I'm currently over 1000 tabs in Firefox. Most aren't loaded in memory. I know this is terrible, one of these days I need to KonMari my tabs and start using bookmarks again. Thankfully I'm not a hoarder of non-digital goods.

Either way, I only get bad performance from a few tabs at a time, usually a Fandom wikia or the pinned Gmail tabs. The first can be solved with a few seconds on about:performance, and the second well... after reading this article and Gorhill's reply, I opened a Fastmail account. We'll see how it goes. But if they're really planning to put all users at risk with an automatic update, Google has finally crossed the evil line.

I sometimes creep above the 1000 mark as well. At 250 right now. I recommend the tabstats extension; it'll especially help when you discover that you've opened the same url in 12 tabs, which is easy to do when the tab count gets that high.

I also recommend periodically declaring tab bankruptcy. It feels so light and clean! For a little while, at least.

> I recommend the tabstats extension

You, sir, are a gentleman and a scholar. I'm under 1000 now! (ok... 999) Deduplication of tabs is pretty useful for the Jira issues (I usually follow links from Slack). If only Jira pages would load faster.

Tab bankruptcy scares me. It's hard to know how much of it is an action I still need to take. Some of it is research I don't want have to find again, but I need to take the time to bookmark.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stats/

6 seconds is an eternity with modern technology. That's seriously unimpressive.

Interesting. Pretty sure __I__ would crash with that many tabs open.

40+ tabs on Linux running nightly Firefox. No issues.

More like 40. I usually try to run < 10, but sometimes it gets out of hand...I tend to have multiple "tasks" of research going on at the same time. Like if I start researching at home at night I'll sometimes leave it open through a whole workday until I can return to it at night. Then multiple things at work, etc. So yeah...probably my browsing habits that may need to change.

You should try the Tree Style Tabs add-on for Firefox. You may need to tweak some of the settings a bit, but once you experience the power of this extension I guarantee you really won’t ever go back to Chrome.

Oh wow, this looks great. Thanks! Seems to fit my workflow pretty perfectly.

I recently found the scalars internal values, and discovered how many tabs I have open: 1,355.

https://joindiaspora.com/posts/14824223

(Yes, I'm an infovore.)

And performance (iMavc v.17 Retina) is usually accetable, at least initially. Somewhere between a few hours to days in, ahard kill becomes necessary.

But; On Android or Linux, both older machines, even with just a tab or two open, within recent weeks, performance has been abysmal. Several other options (console browsers, Dillo, Konqueror, Surf) are at least responsive for very light browsing.

I've wiped Chrome and Chromium from Mac and Linux. That's not possible on Android, and though I'd much prefer avoiding it, I'm typing this on Chrome/Android.

(The question of why I've got so many tabs open, or how to manage/adjudicate them, is ... a longer post. TL;DR: tab management user state management, workflow, and ergonomics all suck. And Chrome is far worse about this than Firefox.)

It is absurd to suggest that anyone needs more than a few dozen tabs. Once you get to the point where you're leaving tabs open for more than a couple of days, you should recognise that you're misusing tabs as a brittle form of bookmarking.

(In my opinion, Firefox and others could solve this by blurring the lines between bookmarks and tabs with some clever UI.)

I half agree. But tab, window, and tree state (I use tree-style tabs) provide critical context.

I really do use numerous tabs productively, though with better management tools that would likely be more lke a hundred or so tops, not 1300.

The count surprised me, thogh not excessively.

It's presumptive to tell anyone "you're holding it wrong".

Empirical data shows that you are incorrect. People use tabs as a "brittle form of bookmarking", whether you like it or not.

As an alternative data-point:

My firefox session is persistent (tab are restored when I open firefox again). Apparently, I'm around 500 right now, which is a bit above average for me (I usually stay around 300).

Firefox's lazy loading is very good, which means I only have 10 to 100 tabs that are actually loaded. Firefox is still fast in these conditions. Since I use tree-style-tabs, most of the tabs are neatly sorted in trees by topic.

You guys seriously have _500_ tabs open?!

The fact that people do this should not be viewed as a personal failing on their part. This should be seen as an indictment against bookmark UIs. If bookmarks were friendly to use, people would use them instead of tabs.

Ive never gotten anywhere near 500, but if a legitimate number of users are needing 500 tabs open that's a perfectly reasonable use case for a browser that fails to support it.

It's kind of like saying "oh no, people are trying to do x with our platform but it's not built for that..." Well, now enough people are doing this, so it's time to change up your UI / performance.

Another gripe I have with Firefox (which I only use on the Lubuntu laptops I have) is that when it wants to update it insists that you restart it and won't let you open another page until you do.

Huh? This never happens to me and I usually don't restart when it nags me to for weeks, because it has a tendency to forget the previous session on updates.

It definitely does it. I'll be looking in to some issue (because that's 90% of using Linux on a device) and suddenly I won't be able to open any new tabs until I restart the browser.

https://techdows.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/visit-about-...

I'm wondering if Google degrades performance on its properties, like youtube and gmail? I use Chrome for GSuite and that's all. I'm fine with FF's performance on YT, but I'm not very picky about such things.

They do use APIs that are unsupported outside Chrome on their properties to advantage themselves. Search for Shadow DOM v0 for lots of info.

Firefox has several experience-breaking bugs for me.

One where on websites that don't explicitly set their form background to white, which is the default on most browsers, Firefox paints them the color of the user's desktop theme, even when the theme is dark. Black text on black background. This bug had been known about for almost 20 years and is marked "won't fix" because the devs still assert that universal user theming of websites is just around the corner. The bug manifests on mozilla.com

Another is that hard refresh sometimes flat out doesn't work. I'm a developer who occasionally makes changes to frontend code, and sometimes Firefox just decided that it's just going to cache everything and ignore what I tell it to do. Ctrl-refresh, shift-refresh, clear cache, all do nothing, I have to killall firefox and restart the browser to get my updated web page to show.

Damn that's why some sites are just black on black on FF. That seems actually insane to not fix

> Firefox paints them the color of the user's desktop theme

I don't think that's not the default. Are you sure you didn't change that? (It's configured under "Colors > Use system colours")

It's the default on Linux, "use system colours" is on by default, and the default background colour for widgets on Linux is usually not white.

You mean the default in whatever flavour of linux you're using. It's not enabled by default on all distros.

It's the default in Firefox for Linux. It's a browser setting, not an OS setting. And in order to turn it off you have to do really obscure stuff in the Firefox launch options, it's funky and makes no sense.

The first one is easy, see the second answer in this thread https://askubuntu.com/questions/8336/how-can-one-make-firefo...

That's ... horrible.

Also pretty obscure. That really shouldn't be necessary.

I am unable to reproduce either of your bugs on mac. I've never had firefox ignore a "force" reload in over 10 years of using the browser, and despite having the "dark" theme running, going to mozilla.com shows a white background just fine.

I am running nightly

Yeah, because it only looks for GTK themes, not whatever theming engine windows and mac desktops have, which is further evidence of the absurdity of their wontfix explanation.

I've had significant performance problems with Firefox recently. It's always felt less snappy than Chrome, but it got much worse these past few weeks -- every time I try to close a window, it would freeze with a busy spinner for 3+ seconds, often 5-10 seconds.

I did a profile refresh last night and I think it's resolved the primary issues (despite retaining all my extensions). If it hadn't, I would have seriously considered switching to Brave or Chrome.

Ideologically, I believe it's very, very important to support Firefox, and I also think the work they're doing with the Stylo, Quantum, etc. is very exciting, but performance issues with the UI itself got me off of Firefox for years once before, and almost did it again recently. (The first time it happened it was shortly after they started using sqlite, and I suspect that both of these instances were sqlite/profile data issues.)

From my own personal experience, UI speed (partly influenced by "bad" profile data) is the area where Firefox is failing, and the only thing that keeps me from unabashedly telling everyone I know that Firefox is better (user-experience-wise).

I did say I have performance problems (in addition to other rendering/UX problems) in this thread and I did say I've been forcing Firefox upon myself just this past week, in addition to numerous attempts in the past.

That "you've yet to have problems" means I'm "very disingenuous" for pointing out that I did is simply ridiculous. This is borderline ad hominem and I call guidelines violation.

That a sibling implying that we're somehow paid by Google to clean up their PR mess is plain insulting.

I use firefox as my daily for a few years now, I switched for panorama view, and almost switched back to chrome when the extension was broken, but stuck it out until it was fixed.

Quantum improved it, but I still have lots of issues with Firefox on Linux. To name a few: (For reference I'm running Firefox 67 on NixOS, xmonad, no DE, 7700K, 64GB RAM, RTX2070, only extensions I use are uBlock Origin, Panorama View, but I've run into all the problems below in safe mode also)

* Still slower than Chrome if you use lots of tabs and windows (generally 100+ on 3 windows depending on current jobs). It's much faster than it used to be but I can't deny when I have to switch back to Chrome for some things, I'm surprised at the (slight) speed difference.

* Visual glitches with lots of tabs the tab bar will occasionally spasm, sometimes all the text will disappear etc.

* Sometimes a window will just stop working. All the tabs are still there, but they all show blank white pages, new tabs are also blank. Different windows will work and a new window will work. Restarting firefox, the same window will be all blank pages. The only solution I've found is open a new window and copy the tabs you want to save one by one to the new working window.

* Bunch of websites just don't work in Firefox. In particular several of my governments payment portals don't work in Firefox on Linux but work fine in Chrome.

* Sometimes I get crackling audio from Firefox that can only be fixed by restarting pulse, never had it happen in Chrome.

* Some streaming websites choke firefox out, for example ufc.tv PPVs are sometimes entirely unwatchable in FF, the audio and video fall out of sync after a few minutes, sometimes it can makes other tabs sluggish. Never have a problem with Chrome, will usually just open a chrome window to watch live streams.

I chalk most of these up to Linux weirdness, but I do quite often find myself annoyed at FF considering its running on a moderately well specced machine, and its literally the only app I run regularly that gives me heartache.

That being said I've stuck with FF over Chrome and still prefer it for various reasons and recommend people try it. I just disagree with the idea I see floating around that there's nothing wrong with FF at all and its just as fast and stable as Chrome. It's not been my experience.

Another data point: I haven't had any of these in Firefox on Linux (Kubuntu) except for occasional crackling audio. For me, that happens (I think) after a non-playing video tab sits there for a few weeks, and I can fix it by restarting Firefox. I have ~800 tabs open.

> RTX2070

That's the cause of your visual glitches (and the occasional "window stops working"). Switch to Nvidia's 430 driver and that should improve things considerably. It did for me anyway.

Never have these issues with Firefox on another PC I regularly use with an AMD GPU. Ditto for my Intel-only GPU laptop (though I don't use that much).

I've only switched to the 2070 in the last month, previously I was running a 1060 with all the same problems (The "window stops working" bug has haunted me on and off for a year or so, but you may be right that the tab bar glitches could have gotten worse since switching to the 2070)

I am on 418.56, I will look into upgrading. Really, I've been suspicious that Firefox might just not like running with no desktop environment, but I feel like it shouldn't make a difference, are you running a DE?

I use both Chrome and Firefox daily on Mojave, and see significant performance differences between the two. My understanding, based on reading[0] and experimentation, is that this may be due to use of display scaling on macOS. Turning this off does help, but makes using external 4K monitors difficult (for example).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18054395

People who have different experiences or preferences than yours are not 'disingenuous'. You're hardly going to convince anyone to try FF by calling them liars.

I've been using Firefox since Quantum, too. The one place where I consistently run into problems is the debugger - it's much slower than Chrome's, and sometimes it gets stuck with a "Loading..." in the source view that never loads. I use it... But sometimes I get frustrated enough to fire up Chrome to debug something.

I have never had any performance or memory related issues with firefox, on a modest xps 13 9343 with 4gb ram. In fact, with regular usage, firefox rarely exceeds 2gb usage, and cpu usage is never an issue. Though I have tweaked my firefox quite a bit, I don't think the core issue is with the browser technology. The technology is fantastic and computers are fast. Rather, I see it is a combination of two things: poor web browsing habits (tabs open, websites visited) and the ever-increasing badness of "modern" websites.

What are your tweaks?

2Gb seems to totally reasonable for my habits, but I can't keep to it, there are just always leaks. Eg; Slack or Gmail just need reloading every few hours to reclaim RAM.

https://github.com/joshuarli/dotfiles/blob/master/misc/firef...

Also have a bunch of umatrix rules, but not inclined on sharing those. Regarding gmail, keep a pinned tab open on about:memory and periodically click on GC and minimize memory, that might be a better solution than reloading.

Nice, thanks!

I have been using Firefox, and only Firefox, on the desktop since before Firefox 1.5 (released in 2005) and Firefox has had plenty of performance issues over the years and still have some. The performance issues still reaming after the Quantum release are mostly caused by shitty websites who only optimize their crappy code just enough for it to work in Chrome. A couple of culprits which slow down my browser significantly are Trello and Twitch. Another issue is that 3D acceleration does not work well on Linux so it is disabled by default and often cannot be enabled without compromising the stability.

Before Quantum on the other hand I had to regularly restart Firefox since it seemed to slow down over time and hog all of my CPU no matter if I had many or few tabs and no matter if I closed tabs so I am not surprised many got burned by Firefox and how it could not handle today's bloated websites until Quantum. The UI also got jankier and jankier the more CPU Firefox started using.

Chrome probably has had its own performance issues but I cannot comment on them since I have not used it much other than on mobile.

I use Firefox as my primary browser. I still have performance problems. Today this happened. After a long session using 5-30 tabs at a time, and devtools variously open, Firefox sometimes completely locks up for tens of seconds. This is on Windows 10. It happened maybe 3 times today. I've never seen it happen on chrome ever. This is a recent high-powered machine with fast (for a laptop) everything.

Yep, this. If you the reader are using a Chrome-based browser and find Google's behavior disconcerting, you need to switch away, now.

I've been using Firefox every day on the same mbp 2015 with the same addons for almost 4y now. It might be uBO, but either way: FF drains battery. The Energy tab in Activity Monitor is very clear about it. When I switch to Safari (also uBO, fwiiw), fans stop spinning, the browsing experience feels like I upgraded to broadband and I get 2h more out of a charge.

Before quantum, during quantum rollout, since quantum, doesn't matter.

I've just accepted that slightly increased privacy comes at the cost of being plugged in to the mains. That's fine, I accept it, but I hope it's hardly disingenuous.

I tried Firefox again right when quantum landed, but at the time there was a significant delay in opening/rendering pages compared to Chrome - as in 4-5 seconds to open Reddit compared to 1-2 seconds on Chrome (this was in macOS on a 2013 MBP with both browsers running uBlock Origin) and an hour of troubleshooting and following tips on the web yielded no improvements - I don't know what's disingenuous about that...

With this latest change to Chrome it's probably time for me to give it another go. I'd love to switch, but the experience needs to be roughly on par.

Just a tip: old.reddit.com loads much faster than the reddit redesign.

You can use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/old-reddit-re... to always use that version automatically.

There are still issues with Firefox but you are correct about people maybe not knowing. I tried it a few years ago before the speed update and it felt unusable. Nowadays it's a little more sluggish than chrome on certain things (JIRA for one) which perhaps is just a result of people optimizing SPA for chrome.

It is VERY important for people to give things a try with and without a proper ad blocker. Any browser gets WAY slower and buggier when it has to deal with the nutty page takeovers with autoplay videos and javascript running.

Yeah, I have been using Firefox since 2007. I don't experience any crashes or bugs regarding performance or usability. But I have been facing issues with websites which don't work at all or developed with only Chrome in mind. And I have been facing this issue enough times that whenever I see a problem, I have to reopen the site in Chrome to confirm that Firefox is not the problem. I think this is a major problem, and as developers ignore Firefox or any other browser, web will be unusable without Chrome.

My issue with Firefox is essentially one bug where they refuse to fix. In private mode, previously closed tabs are, for some reasons, restorable. This doesn't happen for Safari or Chrome.

How do you make that happen? I can't seem to reproduce it.

I believe this is within the same Private Browsing session, so if you're closing the window (default behavior with the last tab I think) you may not be seeing it.

Oh, I thought they meant restoring a whole session, but yes, I see that it will restore a tab if you just closed it.

I actually use this feature regularly... I consider a private browsing session gone when its window is gone, typically. Either way, nothing is saved to disk

Can confirm. Though it doesn't really bother me personally - I think I actually prefer this behavior and don't consider it a bug.

I thought there was some kind of time limit after which closed private tabs are no longer restorable? I'd prefer that to immediately losing the closed tab, if the time limit is reasonable (say, 30 seconds).

Wouldn't getting able to restore a recently closed tab even in private mode be somewhat similar to having your browsing history being kept, even if for that particular browsing session?

I prefer this behaviour of limiting the browsing history per tab per session instead of the way Chrome implements it

Definitely not a bug. It's a private window, not a private tab. As soon as you close the window, all history is gone.

Is that a bug or a feature? I wish they had this in Chrome

That's a feature. Chrome will refuse to remember history so that you can reopen the tab, however it will remember all other data from the closed tab such as cookies. If you log into a website in an incognito window, close all tabs of that website and then open a new tab and navigate to the site again, you'll still be logged in.

It tricks you into thinking that session state is kept only per-tab by disabling a useful feature (history), however the incognito session's state is actually scoped per-window and not properly cleared/forgotten until you close the window.

Firefox knows how to have temporary window-local cookies/site data _and_ history. Chrome doesn't know how to keep the history. It's a missing feature IMHO.

I don't think that is true. I am using incognito all the time for web dev to test without cookies.

It's trivial to check that it's true for yourself

Just started Firefox and opened a popular local website. - the browser address autocomplete felt like I am waiting, while in chrome when I type few letters it shows suggestions like literally instantly - when I hit enter the website is loaded fast, but still slower than chrome. Like 2,3 times slower. In chrome it is loaded for like < 1 sec definitel, for firefox it is like 2 sec.

Closed Firefox and tried this again couple of times. Both issues are still present.

Edit: I have uBO installed on both.

My one issue with Firefox is the disk usage. Running on an internal SSD, the entire browser still slows to a crawl for 30+ seconds upon opening, regardless of the previous tabs open (although if a video is there, it takes even longer).

I've done all the tweaks and configurations found online, and nothing has made a marked improvement whatsoever. Not going to switch, but it's incredibly frustrating.

Are you experiencing this pause on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux? I ask because my employer has some crap McAfee security theatre software installed (Windows) that causes this same issue for me for any application that loads any large-ish file (or large number of files) on startup. Since Firefox is going to load a bazillion things from cache on startup it (or similar software) could be causing the problem.

I had support temporarily disable McAfee's "on-access scanner" thing so I could test it and the problem went away immediately. Everything was nice and snappy again!

Of course, they turned it back on after the test...

I'm experiencing it exclusively on Windows, as I don't use Linux for web browsing. I don't have any anti virus other than MalwareBytes and Windows Defender, and I've completely turned off all forms of caching for Firefox in a vain attempt to fix this.

I guess maybe it could be Windows Defender? Doesn't quite explain why the Firefox process is the one that is sucking literally my entire r/w bandwidth, slowing my computer to a crawl and inhibiting all OS functions. Defender does this every once in a while, randomly, but it doesn't show up during Firefox's start-up.

It works fine after like a minute of warm-up, but I still think that's unacceptable on an SSD. Still gonna use Firefox of course...

Facebook is a step by step strategy on MacBook Pro, starting from Servo launch. Here's a ticket https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042

I'd love to get back to FF, but I have no idea how could that release with current state of things be allowed. Does your MacBook have Retina display?

Firefox lost its only advantage when it deprecated its more powerful extension APIs in favor of WebExtensions.

So I guess now that Google has gimped Chrome's extension API, it has regained that advantage.

Speaking of extensions, I really miss FireBug in FF. The new "inspect element" tool lacks some very important features like easy XPATH finding/defining which are critical for web scraping.

Slack is quite laggy in Firefox compared to chrome. It’s annoying enough to make me switch back to Chrome.

I only keep Firefox around as a back up for when there's a one-off website that doesn't work properly with Safari. Otherwise Safari is my default. It just performs better than anything else on OSX/iOS.

Safari is my default too. The UX for its devtools is far better than Chrome's IMO.

+1, I'm a front developper and I very like this devtools. Chrome devtools look like "old thing" but it is also powerful

Is there a way to fix the scrolling? That rubber-band effect is horrible. Usually people get mad when websites screw up scrolling behavior but here you have an entire browser doing it and nobody seems to mind...

The first Firefox Quantum version broke on my work laptop and I never managed to work out what it was. It probably interacted badly with some corporateware, I don't know, but it would just crash on start.

Linux is a third-class citizen for Firefox and its very obvious. Not only is the rendering performance and responsiveness subpar compared to Chromium, but even very basic things like XDG spec support have still not been implemented after sitting on bugzilla for more than a decade.

To me, its incredibly ironic. On one hand, it makes sense for Firefox to focus on Windows because that's where most of its users are. On the other hand, what's the point of using Firefox in such a privacy-hostile OS filled with ads, telemetry, and tracking?

I did give Firefox a _serious_ exclusive try for the past two months. It's terrible for heavy websites. Clickup, PivotalTracker, JIRA, Zeplin - the browser just chokes on these sites and get janky. On Chrome they are butter smooth.

I don't know what to do. I want to use anything other than Chrome, but I also want a sane workday and not have the browser jank my day up constantly.

I would use Brave but they don't have a proper sync system yet. I switch between my imac, macbook pro and macbook air throughout the day, I need sync to be there.

This has got to be some bullshit shilling. I use all those sites all day every damn day with no problem in Firefox whatsoever.

Agree, those are my regulars and I solidly use Firefox for daily browsing and have never had those issues on those sites.

nah i've had it too, granted it's on a 10 year old Xeon box I got for 40 bucks 4 years ago on an equipment auction at my work, but Asana and clickup are unusably slow, so when I last tried to switch for Firefox I'd just use them in a chrome instance ( where it was actually usable) ,the trouble was I would keep accidentally opening links etc in chrome and before I knew it I was using just the chrome browser.

It might really depend on hardware and OS... we would have to know a lot more about both of your setups to determine why you guys are getting such different experiences.

Is it possible this is a hardware-related issue?

No shilling. Verified slow as balls on imac 2017, macbook air, macbook pro 2017 and macbook pro latest. Using ff developer edition.

I have an iMac 2015 and a MacBook (the one with the slow dual core ultrabook CPU). I use the normal edition of Firefox most of the time. I've never seen Clickup or JIRA run faster in any other browser.

Jira was the fastest for me in Chrome. Firefox was slower, Safari was slowest.

It may be related with your screen resolution, I agree that Firefox has serious performance issues on Macs due this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 [Poor battery life on OSX with scaled resolution]

This breaks the site guidelines. They require you not to call names and not to make insinuations about astroturfing when commenting here. Would you mind reviewing and following them?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Plenty of explanation of why we have that anti-insinuation rule is here for anyone who wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

I'd suggest you try creating a new profile (after saving your bookmarks elsewhere) and start from there, installing your favorite extensions one by one. An uninstall and a fresh install could also be combined with this. Check the Firefox knowledge base for instructions on creating a new profile.

If you have Firefox sync on, you can also do a profile refresh from about:support and it will re-add your extensions via the sync. I did this last night and I think the only things I lost were userContent.css (which I'd backed up) and custom search engines.

Yesterday, whenever I closed a window, it would freeze for 3+ seconds. After refreshing my profile, it's back in full working order again.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I also lost all cookies (which is probably a good thing), notification settings, and my custom containers. tbh, the only thing that really matters is that I still have all my bookmark keywords. Everything else could have been wiped and I'd be fine.

This is a legitimate reasoning to keep using chrome. If for a person the benefit of better performance outweighs worse experience with ads, it's perfectly reasonable to use the thing that creates more value to you. I guess it will take more than hard limit on filters to force majority of people away from chrome. And Google is betting on that, for good reason too.

I currently use Firefox, and recently (likely owing to multi-processing) Firefox eats up 2G of RAM for me[0]. I have ~700 tabs open so that may be a factor as well. Other than this the browser works great for me, and I have always used Firefox as my main browser.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/O8vvwUC.png

Did you say ~700? Shit, I have way higher memory usage and I'm only 15 tabs open (not that I complain - the overall RAM impact for me is nothing).

Yeah it was a higher total than I expected myself, but I do use a fair portion of the tabs fairly frequently, as I can witch to the tab I want by typing into the address bar.

Firefox doesn't even properly support hardware acceleration in Linux.

Neither does chromium unfortunately, although Fedora now incorporates the out of tree va-api patches for chromium by default. This is one of the biggest things keeping me on chromium, video acceleration in the browser significantly improves battery life.

There is a package for Arch as well, and it was previously in the default package, but they removed it again temporarily. This is keeping me on Chromium as well, but if it were added to Firefox then I'd reconsider.

This is a rather ambiguous and incorrect statement. Hardware acceleration of some things is disabled by default because of a security issue related to the way X11 works (it's complicated but in short, one window can "see through" to another window--even if it's an entirely different app). You can re-enable it via the prefs (forget the name but it's under "Performance") or just toggle `layers.acceleration.force-enabled` in `about:config`.

Furthermore, acceleration is enabled by default for loads of things. It's just some certain WebGL features that aren't hardware accelerated. For example, when you play back a video it's going to use hardware acceleration by default (if the underlying library supports it).

Firefox on Linux absolutely does not support hardware accelerated video playback

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1210726

There's also non-performance issues to be wary of Firefox. The Mr Robot surprise extension installation is something Mozilla said will never happen again, but lost them some trust. Not that Chrome is much better in that regard

Do not discount the fact that Google will pay highly for PR on this platform.

The HN guidelines ask you not to post insinuations about astroturfing to this site. If you're genuinely concerned about abuse, please email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it (which we will). But it's not ok to shoot it as cheap ammunition into an argument—it poisons the well, and is a thousand times more likely to be an imaginary projection than anything else. I've written hundreds of comments about this over many years, so there's plenty of explanation for anyone who wants more: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....

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