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Comment by psychometry | Hacker News Reader

Several times over the past five years I've tried to switch from Chrome to Firefox and found it to be too slow once all add-ons were included. For a few months I've been using Firefox full-time and I'm finally switched for good. I encourage others to give it a shot.

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When a comment like this pop up, I launch this Chromium instance I have installed but never used, and it takes several seconds to launch (from an SSD, so that's no the limiting factor), while Firefox opens almost instantly. I think some operating systems (at least Windows) pre-cache frequently used applications and their data so that they start as quickly as possible. Maybe that's what you notice everytime you try to switch?

I bet you're right. For me on Linux with Firefox as my main driver:

Chromium startup to empty page: 7 seconds. Firefox startup to page populated with tabs: 3 seconds.

It's worse though - since I don't often reboot and I have Firefox running almost all the time the effective start up time for Firefox for me might as well be zero.

Perhaps oddly, I've never perceived Firefox as slow - but I'd be the first to admit that I use it only for rather mundane purposes, so maybe there are use cases where it would be deficient.

I find this too, both on Linux and MacOS Chrome takes longer to load, longer to load pages, and eats huge amounts of CPU and RAM. By contrast (again, my experience), Firefox opens instantly for me and loads pages very fast even with about five addons installed.

If this is on Linux, you probably have the snap or flatpak version of chromium installed.

Every day for the last 10+ years I've run both Firefox and Chrome on each of my screens. I have no idea what you're talking about in regards to a speed difference. The only reason I use Chrome is because it's the the new IE and I need to see and experience what my clients are.

You've got that right. We're quickly heading back to the days of "This website best experienced in IE6." (replace IE6 with Google Chrome). It's not a good thing.

> found it to be too slow once all add-ons were included

That sounds like it's likely to be a performance issue within one or more of the add-ons. Which add-ons are you using? There may be better alternatives that don't cause performance issues.

If Firefox is fast enough for you now with your add-ons, it would be even faster with a more optimal set of add-ons.

It certainly wasn't add-ons. Firefox has a long history of performance issues.

EDIT: I see the firefox brigade is out in full force.

The comment I was responding to specifically said "found it to be too slow once all add-ons were included", so I don't think it's at all unreasonable to talk about the add-ons. That doesn't mean I'm dismissing the possibility that Firefox itself had a performance issue as well.

"The software doesn't perform well with your use case, huh? Have you tried getting a different use case?" :)

CPU doesn't execute <program> fast enough. Have you tried a different <program>?

Same! Containers and Pop-Out video are the killer features too IMHO

yeah, as long are containers aren't synced and available on android it's not really an option for me, it's nice I can isolate certain sites, but if it doesn't work everywhere it's a bit pointless for me.

So having containers and pop out video available nowhere is preferable to them being available on desktop but not mobile?

Progress on Containers is visible here: https://github.com/orgs/mozilla-mobile/projects/51#card-4487...

I just used the pop-out video feature for the first time, after thinking it was going to be useless. It is really awesome and the ability to put the video anywhere, not just in the browser, was one of the first things in a while that made me say wow to a new feature in a web browser.

I love using it as I WFH and use an RDP session to my work computer, open PIP on my local machine and have it hover over my RDP session. Very nice!

Containers are awesome. Still waiting, though, for when I can set bookmarks to use a specific container. I have a few different gmail accounts and it would make accessing them a lot easier (having containers at all is already a huge improvement).

I use pinned tabs for a similar use case (o365). Open the page in the container you want, right -click -> pin tab and it will remain on the left of the tab bar with just the icon remaining.

Yup, that's exactly what I do right now as well.

Click ••• > Always open this in a Container > Pick one. Done.

As I mentioned, it's for multiple different gmail accounts. Same url, different containers.

you might be able to trick around that if you can set up something that redirects. I have multiple bookmarks that go via the same URL via a redirect (it's an SSO login flow), but if I set the initial URL to be tied to a specific container, the entire flow remains in that container. So if you could set gmail.example.org to to redirect to gmail and gmail2.example.org as well, you could tie those urls to a container and use bookmarks. It's a bit roundabout, but it probably works.

> For a few months I've been using Firefox full-time and I'm finally switched for good. I encourage others to give it a shot.

I agree. I tried to switch several times since 2016. A couple of months ago, Firefox finally performed well enough I could do it. I'm the type of person who has five windows open with twenty tabs each, and it handles that now.

I also added Container Tabs Sidebar, DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, Firefox Multi-Account Containers (this thing is amazing for keeping sites separate!), and uBlock Origin. I like it now more than Chrome.

For me the killer addon is Temporary Containers. It creates and destroys containers for each domain or subdomain, but you can include exceptions.

I've been keeping ten to twenty windows open, with 100-800 tabs total, in Firefox, since before Chrome existed. Chrome never has even come close to being able to handle that. I am so baffled by stories like yours.

Same here. I use Firefox with Tree Style Tabs extension with lots of open tabs. I could never manage that in Chrome.

Ever since the Quantum updates Firefox has become faster but it wasn't very slow to begin with. Maybe it was a bit slower on some netbooks bit it hasn't been an issue on my PC.

Workona + The Great Suspender make it manageable for me (72 tabs open currently, probably peaking over 100 in an average workday).

No still laggy for me, I only use it for some alternate accounts. Just feels jittery compared to chrome specially when you are using the element inspector.

Same. Firefox gets bogged down debugging one of our more complex websites. Was quite surprised when chrome didn't. Figured all the speghetti meant it was doomed either way.

Yeah, I've found that Firefox is fine (even better than Chrome) on simple websites. But it gets bogged down on complex sites like Facebook or Gmail.

Firefox gets bogged down in Gmail by some sort of tracking pixel or something, and it's noticeably improved by content blocking.

I have the complete opposite experience. Firefox runs smoothly even when I have 150+ tabs open in 4-5 windows. Meanwhile running 20+ tabs in Chromium bogs down my system so hard that the mouse can start lagging.

To be fair it runs very nicely when not excessively tabbing everything, but that's just how I prefer to use the web.

still laggy for me too but the lag factor is now lower than the google-annoys-me factor

Switched a year go, no issues, never going back to Chrome.

Same here, My switch happened over the weekend. Still looking for a convenient way to have profiles that are like chromes user button, but overall I'm happy to escape Google's grip.

I'm assuming you've seen https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-account... ?

It doesn't work in exactly the same way - you don't by default get a different window per-profile. Instead, tabs get a different colour for each.

That Multi-Account Containers extension is awesome. My primary use case for Firefox container tabs is that I have separate Google accounts for personal and work stuff. With Multi-Account Containers, I can have Gmail and YouTube in Personal tabs and Google Calendar and Docs in Work tabs.

You can also use Firefox's about:profiles page can to open and manage different profiles in different windows in one running instance of Firefox.

One of the benefits of Chrome's user profiles this misses is the ability to have separate bookmarks for different profiles (Personal & Work for example)

This is the killer feature I can never drop now that I've started using it.

No, I hadn't - thank you (bow). Chrome is now buried in the backyard. (That's legal right?)

> For a few months I've been using Firefox full-time and I'm finally switched for good.

What was different for you that made switching permanently to Firefox acceptable this time?

It would help if you post the details of the machine you are performing the switch.

Same here, with my recent OS install I've gone Full Fox and loving it.

Because Firefox disabled all add-ons and only 7 work.

I think you are talking about firefox for android? I have 19 active right now on firefox for macos

I'd consider that if it wasn't slowly eating all the available RAM on macOS.

It doesn’t. Disable your extensions and re-enable them one by one until you find the one which is leaking.

or check about:memory and about:performance

I find that that is usually due to certain sites that use massive amounts of poorly written scripts. You can see it in the Firefox memory report. The new Facebook UI is a good example. If you kill that content process it will free the memory and reload the page.

I'm using it, but I need to restart it several times a week because it stops playing video. For comparison, I only restart Opera/Chrome for updates once in a few weeks.

And I still hate the "many tab handling" in ff where it makes me scroll.

There is the “⌵” icon on the right side of the tabs that pulls down a list of open tabs.

I find this more useful than the ever shrinking tabs on Chrome. I have a hard time find a tab in Chrome once the number of tabs gets large.

Compared to Chrome where you just get a row of indistinguishable minute tabs with no visible text? You can configure the min/max tab width in Firefox's preferences to control when it will start scrolling.

It will still start scrolling though. I'm happy with just the favicons, the one extra letter or two don't help really. Never had problem with 100+ tabs when I was using Opera. With firefox it was always a fight to set it up.

Firefox is unusable on Ubuntu.

They have a years old bug they can't / won't fix that causes stock Firefox to be at 100% CPU constantly, regardless of what you are running.

I finally switched to Brave and amazingly, it manages to run basic websites at minimal CPU. And it isn't like I am running some rinky-dink computer. I have 32GB of RAM and a Ryzen 9 3900x.

EDIT: Single tab of the front page of reddit, no add-ons, nothing loading, Firefox goes between 7% and 21% CPU. Meanwhile I have 20 tabs open in Brave and it is sipping between 0.7% - 3%.

Is it something specific to Ubuntu? I use it on Xubuntu all day, every day, and never see it spike or have problems of any kind. I have a potato.

After looking more, after being prompted for the bug, it may be an issue with Firefox getting stuck in a loop trying to load fonts.

I may work on fixing this locally, but I may just stick with Brave since it works just fine.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495900

I use Firefox on Ubuntu and do not have this issue - is there something more specific that triggers this behavior? Have a link to the bug tracker?

No clue to be honest, I just opened it on a single tab of Reddit and it was using high single to double digits of CPU sitting there.

I looked at the bug again with fresh eyes and it seems like there is a deeper issue that may be my fault.

I am running i3-wm and it seems like Firefox gets stuck in a loop if you don't have all the fonts it expects. I had a previous issue where I was crashing my terminal when a program tried to show emojis, which was a legitimately a fun issue to figure out.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495900

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1499385 (not sure if this was the one I saw before giving up + installing Brave, but the fact there are _tons_ of "Firefox hitting 100% cpu" is telling)

Aha, that is something to watch out for, and may explain what I've seen on some websites!

I'm using it on Focal and it's fine. Can you link to that bug? Maybe something related to hardware acceleration? I had trouble with that in the past year.

I use Firefox 78 on Ubuntu 19.10 and do not see 100% CPU usage at all. In fact, with over 1000+ tabs all 8 cores are just over 10% (of course there are other processes running as well).

Is there a bug with more details on this?

Curious about this too. I use it on a couple of 18.04 and 20.04 *buntu's, and only occasionally have trouble with it.

I have noticed there are some websites that tend to make it both consume CPU and prevent my machine from screen-blanking, but I find them easily enough with the the diagnostics tool in ff. I don't recall having that problem with Chromium, but I feel like I've given it up for good now.

> Single tab of the front page of reddit

Not surprising, considering the (new) reddit website has the most bloated, sluggish UI I've ever used. And the only change they made recently made it worse as it added autoplaying livestreams.

Yeah, I may have been purposefully putting my finger on the scale a bit.

google.com was bouncing around 1 and 3%. Firefox becomes unusable for me to do webdev on with multiple tabs if each tab is doing 5%+ each.

You've obviously never used Instacart.

Old Reddit Redirect add on is a requirement for me to browse reddit these days. I imagine they'll turn it off some day and hopefully they will Digg their own grave ;)

Sorry but that's clearly something on your end, and you know this.

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