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Comment by spyremeown | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday I downloaded Firefox on my 2018 Macbook because Chrome slowed the thing down to an absolute crawl.

What. A. Difference! Firefox is so snappy, and at one point it was using less CPU than iTerm2. Mozilla has received a lot of crapped these past years, as did Firefox, but throughout my life this software has been free and open for me to use. I thank the contributors a lot for it.

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Actually, the longer you use your browser, the slower it becomes.

If you refresh other browsers, it will be fast again.

That's not really the car with Firefox in my experience that is an issue that's common to chrome (and as such electron etc...). I haven't refreshed my Firefox in probably 5+ years and it's very snappy despite me having a lot of extensions installed.

There does seem to be some internal limit to the history size though. My installation is also more than 5 years old, but I can't browse back more than ~6 months.

This helps with performance for sure.

I have used FF for many many years and the way to keep it fast is, on exit, to delete all data.

I have not experienced a noticable slow down over the last ten years of using Firefox, even on modest hardware from from the early 2010's.

That said, this year I enabled clearing the browsing history and cache every time I close Firefox, which keeps my address bar clutter free and hyper responsive. Searching trough my bookmarks is instant! It keeps the browser lean and clean.

Can someone elaborate on what it means to refresh a browser in this context?

Update it? Clear cache?

Yeah, cache, history, cookies and other storages. In firefox you can simply delete the profile and make a new one.

Would love to use Firefox, sadly I have to browse many websites in foreign languages and Chrome has the best option for translation. :(

Have you tried add-ons?

I’m in a similar situation and the Firefox translation add-ons simply don’t work. Chrome is where it’s at.

I can recommend the simple translate plugin with uses Google translate. You can translate am entire website, vor just tue highlighted snippet

The most recent version of the plugin seems broken, so I had to revert to a previous version. Using this plugin for a few months now, and it works quite well.

when was the last time you tried them? the official mozilla one is certainly still behind chrome's, but it's leagues better than what was available on ff in the past

It may not live up to Google Translate (yet), but there is an official translation addon:

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

I'm really looking forward to seeing this improve.

[I'm also hoping that things like this and the Common Voice project might eventually lead to an open / privacy respecting Mozilla voice asistant service. Maybe that's just optimism, who knows?]

Deepl.com

And how do you use it with Firefox?

Try this: https://github.com/FilipePS/Traduzir-paginas-web IMO It's even better than the built-in translation of Chrome

WOW. This looks great. Thanks. I will be testing it for a while.

Now try twitch... It is impossibly slow on Firefox.

Works fine for me, is there a particular part of the site experience that works badly for you?

I would say though, that twitch is one of the worst offenders in terms of bloat, of all websites I have ever visited, so I guess, if one visits it with not a good machine and allows all the bloat to load, it can make for a crap user experience.

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