Hacker News Reader

Comment by winter_blue | Hacker News Reader

I've gone back and forth between Firefox and Chrome.

It's just that Firefox is noticeably slower than Chrome (or at least was about a year ago). Even simply switching between open tabs around what feels like 0.5 seconds, whereas on Chrome, tab switching is instantaneous. I've run Firefox in multi-process mode (since that was an option), but even with it, in general it seems like Firefox gets noticeably slower than Chrome when you have a lot of open tabs. I've always preferred and wanted to use Firefox over Chrome, but the performance degradation was too much to bear.

View on HN

Hi! We at Mozilla certainly don't see that! I'm at 815 tabs in this window alone and switching is instantaneous. Did you happen to file a bug report about this atypical behavior?

Hey Mozilla Employee,

Could you guys please add a feature where any link opened from within a container opens in the same container category? (Like if i'm in Personal, I stay in Personal unless I explictly opt-out)? It's such a pain to constantly right-click and open tabs. Thanks :)

Surprisingly, that is the default behavior for me: if I click a link in the reddit container for e.g., it opens a new reddit container tab with the link.

links opening in the same container is the default behaviour ... what precisely are you doing that this isn't working?

That is the default behavior. Looks like you changed something in the settings.

Open the extension, click on 'Personal' and deselect 'Limit to designated sites'

PS: You can ctrl+click on the 'plus' button on the tab bar to open a new tab in the current container.

[not OP] What are your specs? I'm on a MacBook Air and was still seeing this. Will check again shortly.

N.B. I'm currently a happy user of Brave as it has integrated AdBlock-style blocking, fingerprinting protection, and HTTPS Everywhere. I'm always evaluating my options as a user, though!

FWIW, Firefox is slower for me on certain pages. I keep Chrome installed for things like Google Docs. For example, in the word processor, it tries to save the document every few keystrokes and Firefox will hang for 5-10 seconds whereas on Chrome it's so fast it isn't noticeable.

Well we know that Google would put elements on YouTube to prevent Edge from using hardware acceleration.

So there might be a factor there. But perhaps it could be an add-on. I discovered that Lastpass injection feature to autofilled had a performance impact.

Switched to Bitwarden and it was noticibly faster.

I use LastPass but I have it installed in Chrome and Firefox, so I don't think that's going to be it.

Firefox developers welcome Bugzilla bug reports for slow site performance. Attaching a performance profile from the Firefox Profiler will make the bug more likely to get traction. Instructions for installing the the Firefox Profiler:

https://profiler.firefox.com/

Google Docs performance is a long-standing issue, but it sounds like you're seeing an unusual problem. (I usually have 10-20 Google Docs tabs open all day in Firefox Nightly.) Perhaps try reproducing with any Firefox extensions disabled. Some, particularly ad blockers, can cause performance problems as they repeatedly scan the page's DOM.

I don't think it makes a lot of sense to submit a bug report for a long-standing issue.

Google Docs can be a little sluggish for me in Firefox, but it doesn't hang for 5-10 seconds every few keystrokes like you describe. It sounds like something unusual is happening.

try spoofing Chrome user agent with an extension. Google is becoming 90's Microsoft and knowingly degrading user experience on non-Chrome browsers

At this point I use Chrome only for Google Meet. It works in FF ok, but I've had audio problems and general performance issues that just don't show up in Chrome.

"Hi! We at Mozilla certainly don't see that! I'm at 815 tabs ..."

Sorry ... hijack ...

Could you please implement a special:

settings://tabs

... URL that just gives a plaintext list of tab URLs currently open ?

As it stands, the only way to get this list is to poke around in /Library/ files and then use JSON command line tools to export ... etc., etc.

I just want a built-in page that gives me all the URLs of current tabs. I could then cut and paste them, or save the page, as I see fit.

Workaround:

1. Shift+Ctrl+D to bookmark all open tabs (in the current browser window) in a new bookmark folder.

2. Right-click on the new bookmark folder and select "Copy".

3. Then paste into your favorite text editor.

Thank you, but that's not a good workaround because your open tabs might be spread across 10 or 12 or 20 different windows ...

This isn't so much a feature request as it is a request for some simple debug info which can be accessed with a special://url (whatever those are called ...)

That's a great idea but it's wildly outside my wheelhouse! Our bug tracker is here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org

FWIW this sounds super easy to do within an extension: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

"FWIW this sounds super easy to do within an extension ..."

It probably is but I feel like debug/info URLs are simple and lightweight and belong in the core feature set - especially this one which you can find hundreds of examples over decades of people asking how to get this information.

Thank you for asking! It's pretty awesome to get a reply from someone at Mozilla itself!

I actually never filed a bug report. I didn't think of the slowness as a bug per se. I thought it was just that Firefox was slower.

One thing I should note is that I've been using an ancient Firefox profile. I copy the profile onto new installs, and I've got bookmarks going all the way back to 2008 or 2009 (my bookmarks are organized into 50 or 100 folders). I also have a bunch of extensions.

I typically have well over a hundred tabs. I used to use the extension Tree Style Tabs, and sometime get close to a thousand tabs (with like 5 to 10 windows, with between 100 to 200 tabs per window).

Also, Firefox was slow on every laptop I used, but not on my desktop. I have a desktop that's fast by 2015 standards. It's got a i7-5280K, 32 GB RAM quad-channel, etc. The few laptops I've had have had far slower CPUs (the fastest one being an 8th Gen Intel i7 "U" processor). While on my desktop, I might average 700 tabs, on my laptop I try to have under 200 tabs.

I've always been on the newest versions of Firefox. For my laptops, I was on Aurora / the Developer Edition. On my desktop (which has an Ubuntu-based Linux distro), I'm on Firefox nightly.

Not sure if all of that info helps. I haven't investigated too much into what's happening. The most probably culprit might be my ancient Firefox profile. Perhaps, if I go back into Firefox with a fresh profile, it'll be a lot faster.

Firefox is notably slower on many Google properties. Usually because they send you a crappier interface if you aren't using Chrome.

Try one of the many browser extensions that spoof Chrome useragent. For me it makes a big difference on Google search results and Youtube

My computer is far from new (it only has 16GB of DDR3) and the switching of tabs in Firefox is instantaneous. With the disclaimer that I only have 17 tabs open.

I am replying only because I think your comment can be misleading to other readers of HN.

Are you on macOS? I held off on switching until a rendering optimization landed a bit less than a year ago, which brought Firefox up to par with Chrome.

I only have 8GB, and its also instant for me. Performance is generally very good across the board. Only trouble I have is with certain Google properties... I do wonder why...!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com