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Comment by grizzles | Hacker News Reader

I'm a firefox user on Ubuntu. They need to improve the cold start time badly. It currently takes me 4-5 minutes from launch to page load. Once loaded I have no issues with the performance but Chrome is vastly superior in this area.

EDIT: I rely highly on the Restore Previous Session feature. That might be why.

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Slow cold starts on Ubuntu are a known issue with Canonical's Snap application format, as acknowledged in official blog posts like https://ubuntu.com/blog/improving-firefox-snap-performance-p...

If you can install a Flatpak or .deb package of Firefox, you should regain that performance. Found a post recommending a "Mozilla Team" PPA at https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2022/04/install-firefox..., but I last used Ubuntu 15 years ago, so I can't speak to the specific recommendations therein.

You can't possibly think that all Firefox and Ubuntu users sit around for 4 minutes waiting for their browser to open. It's clearly something specific to your setup.

If you want to report this issue I suggest first trying a fresh install of another OS on the same device just to ensure it's not hw. And of course the standard troubleshooting is to start Firefox in troubleshooting mode, that runs it without any plugins enabled.

I have the same issue. But I know the cause—-snap.

That's a local issue for sure. Not sure how, might be Firefox's fault in some way. But it's not just a combination of Firefox and Ubuntu. (I use Firefox on Ubuntu 22.04 and it's a couple seconds, maybe.)

Probably firefox is ridiculously in a snap. Normally, it takes a second to load tops.

That's the default install method for Firefox on Ubuntu, last I checked. I think they only recently had an apt repo too. I don't think it's specifically an issue with Snap either, nor do I think Snap is a terrible tool besides it being a centralized package store that you can't create 3rd party repositories for, though I understand people also complain about the block devices Snap packages add to your system.

Anyway, the intent of my original comment was just to say that they should do some more investigating on their issue because it's not as simple as Firefox in a Snap package on any Ubuntu installation.

Using Firefox on Fedora 39. It takes 1-2 seconds to start with lots of tabs reopening. I have had issues with videos not playing from time to time but other than that, I am really liking it (coming from MacOS and Chrome).

I routinely have >3000 tabs open. It never takes more than a second or two to open.

I’m not going to ask you why. But how. How do you manage or organize those many? Tree tabs?

I use container tabs and tab search. I too have lots of tabs open.

Tree tabs (sideberry). I just never close tabs, old tabs are suspended by Firefox automatically, and I never shut down my pc, just sleep.

It's just a bad habit at this point x)

Why?

Not them, but tree tabs + auto tab discard is a great way to browse documentation when working on a project. That can easily use up dozens of tabs.

3000 seems excessive, but tabs are better than bookmarks since they save page state like scroll position, so many people use tabs instead of bookmarks. That's more a lack of useful functionality in existing bookmarks than an inherent advantage of tabs IMO.

Have you tried deleting your profile and starting fresh? Something is clearly messed up. Launching takes a fraction of a second for me on NixOS with a years-old profile.

Maybe due to the snap situation there? Will you try firefox using flatpak or Mozilla's native builds?

> It currently takes me 4-5 minutes from launch to page load.

Something is definitely not working right on your end. I'm on Debian and it takes seconds to restore 4 Firefox windows with 60 or 70 tabs.

Is the Firefox snap perhaps on a spinning rust drive?

(I boot from SSD but have spinning rust for /home - so I can hear when Firefox is hammering the drive. It seems that any time it updates or fails to quit cleanly it thrashes the HD for maybe 10 to 20 seconds the first time I visit something like facebook or youtube.)

> EDIT: I rely highly on the Restore Previous Session feature. That might be why.

As do I, and it doesn't take as long on my machine. Perhaps your hardware is unusually slow or you're using extensions that do something on every tab after startup, even the lazy-loaded ones. Firefox restarts in seconds for me.

I had a similar issue on Arch Linux some time ago. I debugged it by running it with strace, seeing what it was waiting for and googling it. Uninstalling some package solved it.

I've had this problem on an Arch machine after no use and no update for a long time. Thunderbird was affected as well, and both unfreezed at the exact same moment a few minutes after launching the first one.

I never had time to investigate this but this was obviously a system problem, Firefox and Thunderbird are fast on all the other machines I use.

I'm on the Ubuntu Firefox snap, and it definitely doesn't take 5 minutes to load. Create a new profile and see if that helps, but it shouldn't take that long.

4-5 minutes is clearly insane, but Firefox in Ubuntu taking 10s of seconds for a fairly simple profile to start is why I went back to Debian after a few months of Ubuntu.

I'm on Ubuntu and Firefox. Cold start to page load is seconds.

Try creating a new blank profile in Firefox.

I'd rather run IE on Windows 8 in a VM than go through a 4-5 min initial load.

what's your firefox version? what's the size of your restore previous session? how much ram do you have?

i also highly rely on restoring the previous session but it never took 4 mins to load

Holy shit what are you doing? Firefox loads within seconds on my x220.

> It currently takes me 4-5 minutes from launch to page load.

o_O

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