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Comment by Dumblydorr | Hacker News Reader

I use firefox on ubuntu and the performance is terrible. Its constantly crashing, tabs crash individually, it hangs, launching memory heavy websites seems to crash it most often. When I switched to chromium the performance got a lot better.

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I use firefox on ubuntu as well and it works very nicely. Its RAM and CPU usage is negligible, sites load very fast, and the developer tools are awesome.

I think something is wrong on your system.

Some anecdotal data in the other direction, I made a comment about my experience on linux 5 months ago [1], and my opinion is still roughly the same (Except the blank tab problem has gone away after a Firefox update at some point, which WAS the biggest annoyance I had, so my mood has improved considerably since I made that post), and I have since taken to using Arch on an XPS, stock Ubuntu on another (more modestly specced) machine, and have had similar experiences there too.

That said I still use and prefer Firefox, but I also have to open up Chrome probably once every few weeks for various reasons, and it has occasional abhorrent behavior that I don't experience with any other program on the same machine.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20049553

Same for me. Been using Firefox in Ubuntu for years and it is lightning fast and extraordinarily stable.

I was having a similar experience earlier this year, so I reluctantly did the same for a while. I got sick of chromium though, really missed reader mode for one thing, so I decided to put in some more effort to troubleshoot.

For me what did it was switching to wayland (sway[1] specifically, from dwm on x11). Now it's a good step faster than chromium.

I agree with the sibling comment; there's something wrong going on, what you're describing isn't firefox's baseline.

[1]: https://swaywm.org/

Chromium has a reader mode but you have to enable it via a command line switch I think.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Chromium/Tips_and_trick...

I see you are downvoted and I think that is wrong.

It would however help a lot if you wrote in a style that made it clear that this was your personal experience.

I'm using an Ubuntu based distro myself (KDE Neon) and have no problems.

> I see you are downvoted and I think that is wrong.

I downvoted the comment. I'm just not sure it adds anything useful to the conversation when it's not representative of the vast, vast majority of experiences that users have. It sounds like an anecdotal, isolated issue. I didn't post a top-level comment to say I've been using Firefox for over a decade without it crashing because it's just not remarkable or interesting.

I'd be more interested if some crash reports or BugZilla issues had been linked to substantiate the comment.

For what it's worth, I'd have downvoted a comment made in the same vein regarding Chrome too.

Can you reproduce these issues with a fresh profile with no Addons installed or about:config changes?

It only crashes for me after it automatically updates. The devs set it to intentionally crash when you open a new tab. I don't know if that makes it better or worse really.

Edit: Here's the related bugzilla report

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1463960

>The devs set it to intentionally crash when you open a new tab

Is it intentional? It sounds like the distro's package manager is swapping out the binaries from underneath it whilst it's running. I have some sympathy for the devs here, because I suspect it doesn't happen with the built-in updater (which, let's face it, most users will be using) which probably swaps the binaries on next start-up and just invites the user to restart the browser.

>and just invites the user to restart the browser

Chromium invites the user to restart. Firefox redirects every request to about:restartrequired

I mean, if you replace application components underneath the running application through a distro-update, it's not that surprising that this doesn't result in a stable state. All kinds of application will become unhappy when you do a upgrade on a running system.

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