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Comment by mattlutze | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised how many people have so many problems with Firefox.

I've never felt impeded by loading speeds, and my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind.

The only downside I've found is that, because so many people just default to "Chrome or nothing," there's occasionally sites that have bugs because, like was the case in the 90s with Internet Explorer, the site developers took the idiomatic Chrome way of building a feature instead of something universal.

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I'm about the same, I don't even know what the loading speeds issue is about, I still remember Firefox Quantum beating the daylights out of Chrome, and I don't know if Chrome ever fully caught up to Quantum?

What's really funny is for ages Chrome would load the browser window even if the whole browser UI wasn't done loading, and sometime after Quantum, Firefox started doing the same trick to make you feel as though it instantly runs.

I've been using Firefox for about 20 years or so, and I don't regret it, but also I have not noticed a degrade in performance. I'm using it on Linux so I don't know if that's drastically different on a Mac these days.

Do you use Firefox for Android? I use it for the extension support but its noticeably slower than Chrome on Android.

I'm on iOS, I guess I mainly use Firefox on Desktop, on iOS there's no point in me using Firefox since its forced to use Webkit under the covers.

firefox on all my devices for the simple pleasure of sending tabs between devices

sometimes i'm reading something on phone and i "send to all devices", i'll sure as shit see it again this way

(even librewolf allows you to continue doing this)

I browse with Orion (for ad blocking) but still have Firefox installed because I can click Share -> Firefox -> Send Tab. Maybe I stumble upon a video I want to watch but not now. Maybe I stumble upon a long form article or reference or something that just is shitty on a mobile interface and I push it to the computer I'm literally sitting next to while having my phone in hand too.

With ublock origin enabled on an android device I'd argue it's rather much faster

The app itself is insanely slow to start up, and it always has been. Try killing Firefox and Chrome, open the browser via a link from another app and see how long it takes for the page to start rendering. I suggest a page with a different color background and nothing else. Chrome is always fast, while Firefox is almost always very slow (pinning the app to my recent list helps on Samsung devices, but isn't available elsewhere)

Is Chrome being cached?

This is actually not a good test because there are a lot of tricky and subtle things that can make the comparison highly unfair. Smartphones will cache apps so that they don't fully close. Then, if you do actually force kill them they will start up in the background.

Are we surprised a Google phone caches the Google browser which is considered to be a high priority app, commonly used, and even the backbone of other apps?

>This is actually not a good test

It is a realistic user scenario, which in my opinion makes it a good test. The real world performance is what matters here. The user doesn't care if technically there is some trick that is being used to "cheat."

  > The user doesn't care if technically there is some trick that is being used to "cheat."

You framed the "benchmark" around performance, not perceived performance. Those are two very different things. We're on HN, so don't be surprised when people correct you or nitpick. Either accept the clarification (if it is correct), clarify what you originally intended to say (without being overly defensive), or move on.

Besides, if we're talking about average user, they're not force closing apps and the phone should be caching the most frequently used apps. So even then the test won't mimic real world experience even if it's about perception. Maybe initially, but not after sustained usage. People usually normalize to whatever they're using

Uhhh... he followed your own advice better than you did.

The device should be absolutely caching the most recently used apps, yes. Force closing is unnecessary, but I manage my apps on my phone not because I want to close background apps, but because I want to keep certain apps running (I don't care about steam or my email or messenger, etc, they open fast; the browser is slow and I want that to stay loaded). Unfortunately, I can dismiss/force-close all apps on my phone, open Firefox, switch to the home screen--and when I switch back it has to start up again fresh about 25% of the time.

The only reliable way I've found to use termux (as an ssh client, not anything high-resource) and Firefox at the same time is to use multi window, dragging termux out of the way of the keyboard every time I switch, as Firefox will regularly need to be reloaded otherwise; if I'm on certain heavy or lazy-loading websites or using a link with a hash in it, it'll then also lose my scroll position. This is particularly frustrating when I ssh into minimized containers with no command completion or man pages.

This is true, but it also applies to not just the chrome browser by Google itself, but also to derivatives (I don't actually use chrome proper unless I need to disable adblock; I still use Kiwi browser for my PWAs, because you can't export your browser profile from one device to another for Chrome[1])

[1]: you actually can with devtools and dexie import export, but it always times out for my databases. Meanwhile on Firefox you can just use devtools to backup the entire profile directory and then replace it in-place.

Replied to wrong comment...

I use Firefox on Android and I don't think (?) I notice a speed difference. At least not a big one.

I don't have anything but anecdotal experience here, but I think Google Chrome was gaming Windows Defender better for awhile, when Windows Defender treats you poorly IO grinds to a halt and then some.

I've never had Firefox issues on Linux.

> I've never had Firefox issues on Linux.

My experience on Linux running on very old hardware (4th Gen Intel) is also good. Firefox feels quick and snappy. It uses a reasonable amount of resources, and has a relatively modest memory footprint by modern browser standards. In comparison, Chromium makes my fans spin on every site and eats several GB of memory.

The annoying part of Firefox is that development seems a bit stagnant in some areas, especially taking into consideration the amount of resources Mozilla has. For example, bookmarks and history still rely on a very old native UI that is quite clunky. Customization via user.js is too imperative and most options are largely undocumented.

And no standard way to configure extensions is something I feel they could spearhead. Ofc extensions can store state however it wants, but more often than not I'm quite fond of my extension settings.

eh, i prefer the bookmark and history library window over the sidebar

I've had various Firefox issues on Linux such as mysterious bad frame rate that I wasn't able to track down (despite toggling every feature related to gpu acceleration in about:flags), slow startup (which I found was due to some dbus configuration), and inability to print (apparmor blocked cups).

I'm certain people have issues, especially when you stick NVIDIA into the mix. I do always run rolling release software on "older"/well supported hardware with good drivers. (And I trust Firefox enough to not sandbox it though Flatpak or snaps)

It's just an anecdote, but I've had several FF issues on Windows, might be a timeline thing however.

Yes I hate how Ubuntu sandboxes firefox by default (even when you install it via apt, it secretly installs the snap instead). Terrible. I eventually had to use a PPA just to get firefox.

Also, Nvidia is non-negotiable due to performance requirements and local deep learning experiments. I think Nvidia has gotten a lot better lately, even Sway (Wayland window manager) works these days. Incidentally I think the bad firefox framerates were only on i3 and not on Sway.

I'm docking my NVIDIA GPU with the vfio driver and have an Intel cheapest dGPU for my desktop.

Then i attach the NVIDIA GPU to either a Windows VM or a NixOS one for gaming or "work".

It takes space and PCIe lanes to do so however, so I run SATA6 drives still :)

But if you can splurge, having multiple GPUs isn't unreasonable, as "Postgrest" docs says(0): Use a collection of sharp tools rather than building a big ball of mud.

0: https://docs.postgrest.org/en/v13/index.html#one-thing-well

I used to have both an AMD GPU and an Nvidia GPU and also dual boot Linux and Windows. But that is an incredible hassle. Nowadays, Nvidia on Linux works pretty well, and gaming on Linux on Steam often works flawlessly with one click, so it's more like a Swiss army knife rather than a big ball of mud.

I never dualboot, Linux runs my hardware. I just pass my NVIDIA GPU between different VMs.

I also wrote a little Python script that uses evdev to capture a numpad I bought and bind keys to different scripts that bind and unbind USB devices from my VMs for gaming.

I run sound though QEMU and pipewire and I get 45ms headphones to mic latency (measured with audacity) so slightly below 23ms latency. (I get essentially half doing the same measurement in Linux)

Virtualisation is a "out in the open" superpower.

Nvidia is really the one hurdle preventing me from fully embracing firefox-- I've had a lot of trouble getting hardware acceleration on Wayland with Nvidia drivers. At this point, I'm not sure if it's a configuration issue or if it doesn't work at all.

Debian? I noticed this too, switched from using LTS version to latest - much better. On arch, no FF issues at all.

What I've found recently is that Linux is surprisingly Firefox's achilles' heel. Canvas and WebGL run easily an order of magnitude slower than Chromium.

Check with https://webglsamples.org if you don't believe it. All of it runs capped at 60 fps on Chrome for me, Firefox struggles to break 30 on mid tier settings in aquarium and stutters horribly throughout most of them. I'm sure it's fast at loading static sites, but I wouldn't ever use it to run any web app. On Windows they're both the same though, which is weird to me.

I'll test it when I get home, I'm really curious, I've not noticed a slowdown, I am using Arch so I'm not sure if that makes a meaningful difference.

thanks for the benchmark tip. FWIW, firefox 140.0.4 on Fedora 42 runs pretty much all tests at 60 fps or therebouts.

I note that the GitHub org has two public members, one of which is from Google: https://github.com/orgs/WebGLSamples/people

Google's been doing advocacy where they do things that either only work on Chrome or just magically works faster there, for a very long time.

I didn't believe it and after trying those samples, I still don't. All of them run flawlessly for me on FF 104.0.4 on an up-to-date Arch install on my laptop.

Wayland or X11? I'm on Kubuntu and from what I remember reading a while back it may be Firefox using something native on X11 that Chrome rolls its own thing for, but I may be misremembering.

Also not seeing any issues, on Firefox 140.0.1 (via Flatpak) on Aeon (GNOME, Wayland). Everything's at my screen's native 165fps (except for the very first aquarium demo, which bottoms out at around 45fps with the maximum number of fish).

I've tried perhaps one third of the samples. All of them ran in 120 fps in 3840x2160 px in Firefox on Linux on my machine. Perhaps it is a configuration problem. My screen has a 120 fps refresh rate, so it probably is capped there.

I've been using Firefox since it was called Firebird, and Linux has always been a 2nd zone citizen.

Most Mozilla developers are on Mac, most users are on Windows, so Linux have never been the focus.

Linux should be the focus. Windows Recall is a hell-to-the-no for me, and then having to have 'cloud accounts' to log in on desktops should be demonized. "Oh but you can just run brew for all your .." -- No, no I can't.

FF, being a pioneer of privacy (not anymore, with anonym adds): Go to Settings -> type 'advert', turn that off. FF, being a major player in FOSS, and community (irc.mozilla.org etc), now I think they do matrix

Should get their priorities straight. To me, it isn't about market share, but Linux just reached 5% market share in the US https://ostechnix.com/linux-reaches-5-desktop-market-share-i...

Valve sponsors Arch Linux https://www.pcguide.com/news/valve-officially-sponsors-arch-...

I just switched to LibreFox, which is Firefox without all the extra junk it peddles.

We'd think, by now, with video games having advanced crazy rendering engines, AI dark magic, that browsers would have it together by now.

They don't.

Many Firefox devs are on Linux; however note that not many Firefox users are on Linux (mostly because desktop Linux has a much much smaller userbase than Windows or Mac). About 4% are Linux, looks like 8-10% Mac, the rest Windows: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware

The recently work with DMABUF on Linux might help a lot of things get faster.

I ran some of these in comparison with Chrome, and Chrome was consistently faster, but only marginally (1-20%). I'm actually quite impressed, an integrated Intel HD 620 / 4x2.4 GHz (!) rendering 10,000 fishes at 30 FPS in a webbrowser.

For reference my numbers are for an RTX 4070, Firefox has no excuse for not being able to crack 60 fps on a demo that looks like it's from the late 2000s in terms of graphics.

Sounds like hardware acceleration isnt working?

I'm running Gazebo at 10 times realtime and inference through cuda, trust me it's working. If Firefox doesn't take advantage of it that's its problem. I've enabled every config setting for acceleration I could find.

Is it possible your os is handing it your integrated gfx on cpu instead of your GPU?

Isn't the fps capping? I'm pretty confident it is because it won't go above that on my system even when I do a trivial number of fish and my monitor maxes out at 60fps...

  > on a demo that looks like it's from the late 2000

Okay... now I think I shouldn't take you seriously...

The literal visual aesthetics aren't really important for the test. You could place some nicer shaders and it wouldn't necessarily change the compute load. Hell, it could just be highly unoptimized. Benchmarks are mostly about having something static to test, not making something visually pleasing.

I'm half kidding, it's entirely possible to overload any GPU with too many draw calls with the end result not looking like much. These fish would run reasonably well on something from that era though I'm sure, it's no GTA San Andreas.

But no it's not capped at 30, it jumps to like 33, 34 sometimes with those settings, it's capped to 60 like Chrome as well. Probably vsync.

You said 60 before so thats why I thought it was capped. Which matches what I'm seeing when I run the tests as well as others

Is your screen 60Hz? Game loops are normally using requestAnimationFrame [0], which is capped at refresh rate of your display

[0]https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/requ...

Try indexeddb. Apparently Firefox is faster than Chrome in recent years when it comes to putting items into a database, but my experience with multi-gigabyte databases (the database contains image blobs and metadata for use as a local webapp) is that chrome is far faster than Firefox. I'd rather use Firefox sure to increased indexeddb limits (for mobile devices with limited storage), but it's just that much slower. I have a chrome-based browser installed on my phone just for PWA use.

Hmm that might also be contributing to dogshit Firefox performance on a web app of mine, I'm using that to store and fetch map tiles. Though that's all async so it shouldn't really matter in terms of rendering aside from having to wait a bit longer to retrieve.

But it already lags like fuck even without that part running or anything much at all, while being buttersmooth on Chrome almost regardless of how much I load up rendering. It infuriates me to hell because there is no optimization I can make to get equal or even usable performance.

What's the webapp? Can you file a bug in Bugzilla in Core::Performance with steps to reproduce?

Can you take a profile? https://profiler.firefox.com You can attach it to the bug, or drop it in #perf on https://chat.mozilla.org (Matrix)

I'm having a different experience.

  Aquarium: 60fps until 20k fish, where I hit 50fps. 30k at 34fps
  Blobs: maxed out resolution and number of blobs, still 60fps
  Field: 60fps at "lots"
  Fishtank: 60fps with 1k fish and sharks
  Spacerocks: 60fps on lots
  Sprites: 60fps on 10k

System: - FF 140.0.4 - Kernel: 6.12.37 - CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X - NVIDIA 4080S (575.64) - 186 tabs open (mostly YouTube. >20 active)

I get a bit worse on my M2 Macbook Air (128 tabs), but pretty close results.

Maybe you need to open more tabs?

Adding some data points to the sibling comments:

Linux Mint 22 (X11 + Cinnamon)

Firefox 139.0.4

Integrated Graphics (AMD Ryzen 7 5800U)

At 1440p 60Hz monitor, every test that listed FPS showed 60fps, and all others looked the same level of smoothness as Chrome.

Displaying the window early is more than a trick, it's a properly better user experience.

My take is that Firefox is not very effective at marketing. For example, Chrome publishes articles like 'Chrome achieves highest score ever on Speedometer' (2024) [1]. I haven't found similar articles or any reliable scores for Firefox. Some computer magazines suggest that Firefox is in second place after Chrome in running Speedometer 3. For me, at least, it's hard to find any specific numbers. Also, it's important to note that Speedometer is a browser benchmark test developed by WebKit, Firefox, and Chrome.

Also, i don't understand why people prefer google over open source. And the sometimes disrespectful and destructive criticism of Mozilla.

[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2025/06/chrome-achieves-highest-sc...

Mozilla does sometimes. For instance 'Quick as a Fox: Firefox keeps getting faster'[2] from 2023 and the related articles in Mozilla Hacks[2]. They used to do that a lot more when Quantum was all the hype and had some marketing performance comparison[3] with Chrome a long time back. Recently, it feels like Mozilla is dropping that type of marketing to focus on the image of privacy and talk about some features.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/uncategorized/quick-as-a-fox-fir...

[2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2023/10/down-and-to-the-right-fire...

[3] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-private-browsing...

Interestingly I did much worse on my Linux FF (13.6) on Speedometer3.1[0] than my M2 Air (29.6), though for the WebGL benchmarks from above the Linux machine (which has significantly more compute power) has no problems with the WebGL tests and the Air does worse. Backbone and jQuery were real killers for the Linux machine. Looks to be mostly Adding100Items for Backbone and literally everything for jQuery was half a magnitude slower.

  > Also, i don't understand why people prefer google over open source. And the sometimes disrespectful and destructive criticism of Mozilla.

Certainly Mozilla deserves criticism. All companies do, right?

But what I don't get is the passionate hate and how the result often ends up being contradictory. Like complaining about FF with that Mr Robot thing (yeah, bad move) and then saying that's why they use Chrome (or some Chromium based browser). It feels like calling someone an idiot for falling face first into dog shit while you're sitting in a jacuzzi full of it. Yeah, both situations are shitty, but come on... there's a lot more shit in one of these...

[0] https://browserbench.org/Speedometer3.1

In two decades of using it (yep) I never had an issue. I used it on Linux, MacOS and Windows and I don't remember any issues whatsoever.

Same here, although I've had a couple issues but I actually contacted the website operator and over time they fixed the issues (either that or firefox themselves fixed it). It never hurts to reach out to tech support and ask for firefox support!

> there's occasionally sites that have bugs because [...people build for Chrome...]

I hear that a lot, but when I tried Firefox for a couple of months I only found that in a single case[1]. It's really not something that happened to me at all. I did encounter issues with ad blockers breaking sites. Disabling uBO helps quite often on misbehaving sites, but it does so on Chrome as well.

> I am surprised how many people have so many problems with Firefox.

I'm not really. Nor am I surprised it works for you and others. It has been this way with Firefox for all of its 20+ years of existence. In its history it made one big leap in that, somewhat ironically given current affairs, when they removed XUL extensions.

But Firefox has always had weird, unexplainable and unreproducible failure scenarios. Some of that is because of its customizability, but also nobody really cares about it.[2] The standard advice of "throw away your profile and try again" is a huge fuck you to users. 1) People have spend time customizing their browser and throwing that away hurts. 2) It doesn't help anybody. If it's still broken you know nothing, and if it isn't you still don't know what caused it.

I guess that was okay in 2004. Lots of software had weird bugs. Nowadays the competition is much more stable.

For me, I dropped Firefox again after a couple of months fighting to get a stable sync working.[3] It just kept failing on Android. The only resolution was to log out and log back in again. Only for it to break in the next couple of hours. I did the "commit profile suicide and rebirth" thing without a solution.

Chrome's sync at least is very stable. Sometimes it falls an hour or so behind. Not good, but so much better than Firefox.

[1] And that was intentional. Typical Google assholery. Google Photos added (adds?) extra HTML to block right-click on photos when a Firefox User-Agent was used. Using a UA switcher extension "solved" it.

[2] Makers of software for power users so often forget to give power users the tools to investigate issues themselves. It's great you allow me to add so many extensions, how about a detailed log to see which is misbehaving?

[3] Firefox's sync also has fewer features. Bookmarks don't get synced, nor do extension settings.

> Bookmarks don't get synced,

*Search engines. Bookmark sync works fine.

Compatibility bugs are rare but definitely occur. If a key component of your workflow has bugs it can be hugely inconvenient. For example Slack Huddles blocks Firefox Firefox, if your team uses them regularly it is a big productivity loss.

It is also very annoying when the first step of every troubleshooting process is "Try using Google Chrome" and if it works the consider your problem solved.

Bookmarks definitely sync with Firefox sync. I have the same bookmarks on all of my devices.

Extension settings can sync, I don't know exactly if it is opt-in or opt-out but some extensions do sync on desktop. The mobile situation is definitely different, mobile doesn't sync to desktop. I don't know if different mobile devices sync with each other (I only have one).

> Bookmarks definitely sync

Yeah, I meant search engines. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44647014

> Extension settings can sync, I don't know exactly if it is opt-in or opt-out but some extensions do sync on desktop.

I mostly tried with uBO. Couldn't get it to work.

Yeah, search engines don't which is annoying and confusing. However on desktop you can use keyword bookmarks which offer basically the same functionality and do sync.

uBlock Origin does it's own weird thing where you need to trigger the sync in the settings interface. I don't think you can blame Firefox for this UX choice.

> However on desktop you can use keyword bookmarks which offer basically the same functionality and do sync.

Search engines can have completion; keyword bookmarks can't. Most search engines don't support it, but some do.

> uBlock Origin does it's own weird thing where you need to trigger the sync in the settings interface. I don't think you can blame Firefox for this UX choice.

It made the same choice in Chrome, so I was familiar with that. It works there, it doesn't work on Firefox. I think it's fair to put that on Firefox.

uBlock Origin sync works for me on Firefox

Probably another one of those "weird, unexplainable and unreproducible failure scenarios" then.

I can't remember the last time something truly annoying happened, but I just ran into it demo'ing a few of the newer vibey low-code app builders, which warned me to be using a Chromium build because of how they built their tool, e.g. Bolt

>I've never felt impeded by loading speeds

I honestly think it's just something people here like to complain about. It's a complete non-issue. No everyday web experience is even close to being noticeably different. Full stop. It's almost like a meme, people say it because they think they should say it. I would ask those people that are complaining, what are you doing with all those extra milliseconds you claim you're saving?

> what are you doing with all those extra milliseconds you claim you're saving?

Watching more ads.

When you have web pages that that completely freeze the Firefox browser but work smoothly on Chrome, you won't call it non-issue.

This doesn't seem to happen to me anymore, certainly not since Quantum. Your experience may obviously differ. I've been running FF for like twenty years now, across Windows, Linux and Mac.

I don't know why I should lower my browsing standards to a Chrome experience because a small percentage of websites work poorly in Firefox. My password manager works in all browsers so I have Chrome with only PW manager and uBlock Lite so I can use it for the ONE website I use that doesn't work in FF.

I don't think it's frustrating to press Ctrl+L, Ctrl+C, $launcher-bind(Meta+D), Ctrl+L, Ctrl+V, Enter to open another browser.

My average experience is a lot better with Firefox and that's what I optimize for.

I have been on Firefox for some years now on Mac, Linux, Windows, and Android. Last year the IRS website had some issues, but that seems to be resolved. Otherwise, I've had zero breakages that cone to mind. I use ublock origin, and pivacy badger, and a few other extensions. I wonder if sometimes the issues people experience with firefox are actually caused from their extensions???

If you haven't used Firefox in a minute, I recommend trying it oht again.

Name one.

Youtube will after a while.

I use youtube a worrying amount, all through firefox (and I am also an ADHD 1000 tabs open person), and I have never had this experience across multiple computers.

Youtube freezes for me on Windows with Firefox. Sometimes it freezes the whole browser so added a rule to block it in uBo and use another browser for it (which also helps me reduce my time on youtube thanks to the added friction). I don't know if its an issue with my specific hardware or what. In Mac and Linux (different PC) it works fine.

You're using an add-on that blocks core functionality. That is not Firefox's fault.

I'm blocking it to avoid it freezing the browser. Before I blocked it, it froze the browser.

You need to keep the same youtube tab open and navigate the website a considerable amount on it for it to occur. I use the same tabs repeatedly, and by the end of the day I get an incredibly sluggish site. Not the end of the world, since I just close the tab and start a new one, but it does exist.

Firefox has had documented issues with youtube for the better part of a decade at least.

I have also had this Firefox YouTube issue.

Fixed by restarting tabs?

Google is known to sabotage non-Chrome browsers and ad-blockers on YouTube, accidentally on purpose at every chance it can get. That's hardly Firefox's fault.

2014: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8606879

2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10877810

2018: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/91i0mc/youtube...

2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18697824

2019: https://archive.is/tgIH9

2019: https://www.thurrott.com/google/207371/google-now-forces-mic...

2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22422522

2023: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...

2024: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41379517

2024: https://xcancel.com/brave/status/1870172541907550496

2025: Whatever you're referring to.

Lets see one then

I can't answer your question directly, as I haven't experienced Firefox problems in a few years. In the past, I experienced regular hangs and crashes.

There are a few point to unpacck here:

  - Qualifying a statement with "Full stop" is a thought-terminating cliche.
  - Due to the different hardware, operating systems, and use cases people have, peoples' experience, and the problems they encounter vary between users of PC software.
  - Milliseconds as overhead to startup may be irrelevant. Ms in most computing contexts is a timescale to be concerned with, as it's relevant for latency, cumulative operations, and responsiveness.

This isn't "most computing contexts", so that point is irrelevant. You've already admitted the point "may be" irrelevant (it is), so why bring it up.

> - Qualifying a statement with "Full stop" is a thought-terminating cliche.

Yeah, well I like it. Full stop.

I've used Firefox with on Windows, iOS, and various linux distributions with absolutely no day to day issues.

Yes, it's the Firefox version of Python's GIL.

> 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind.

There's a bug on Linux where background windows continue rendering, even if they're in an inactive workspace or not visible in any other way. This really hits performance, but it doesn't seem to be fixable due to some limitation on GTK3.

If I hide/resize my system status-bar, every single window gets resized to match the new available screen space. Firefox re-renders all content in all windows, causing multiple CPUs to spike to 100%.

See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1880467

In fact, there are a lot of bugs which are basically "unfixable due to limitations in GTK3". So the experience is likely quite different that on other platforms.

Regrettably, there don't seem to by any plans to move away from GTK in future.

Just an idea. In my SwayWM setup, a) I run every application in its own cgroup (via systemd-run), and b) I have a daemon that subscribes to window and workspace events, gets the current tree, figures out the PIDs corresponding to invisible vs visible windows, figures out the cgroups corresponding to those PIDs, and then uses cgroup freezer file to freeze / unfreeze them. Other than a few hard-coded exceptions that I want to run while invisible (IRC client etc), any invisible application is transparently frozen and unfrozen.

For "single-instance applications" like firefox, launching a new firefox while the existing one is frozen will hang, so instead of launching /usr/bin/firefox directory I have an intermediate ~/.local/bin/firefox script that unfreezes the firefox cgroup and then exec's /usr/bin/firefox.

Of course if at least one FF window is visible then this doesn't help with your problem, since the cgroup as a whole will be unfrozen. It only helps if none of the FF windows are visible.

I can't seem to reproduce any CPU spikes on my end when repeatedly hiding/unhiding various GNOME toolbars (top or bottom).

I was in your boat up until a few days ago, when it randomly decided in wouldn't load properly. I force quit it, and then it forgot all my tabs. Now, it actually remembered what seemed like the correct number of tabs, each with the correct container, only the address was gone from every tab!

Other than that, it works well enough for me. My only beef is I can't completely disable tabs, but I don't know of any equivalent browser that can.

Are you on Linux?

In any case there should have been a List of Tabs backup file ( cant remember what is was called ) and you can manually replace it to recover your Tabs.

"About:unloads" allows you to manually unload all tabs.

> My only beef is I can't completely disable tabs, but I don't know of any equivalent browser that can.

There is an addon[1] that allows you to discard tabs both manually and with a degree of automation. I've been using it for a while and it works quite well.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

Oh, I wasn't talking about "unloading" tabs, but about completely disabling the tabs ui feature. By that I mean always create a new window instead of a tab.

I am a heavy user of firefox and I am still unhappy with mozillas policy.

* Firefox-Hello is a easy to pick example of a broken service run by a 3rd party being imposed on users.

* Pocket is another service I never asked for.

* Instead of focusing on the browser, mozilla puts their effort into an English language database.

It appears to me mozilla does not understand their target audience.

Recently I tried to customize firefox for screen recording and ran into lots of outdated documentation about userChrome.css

Pocket is shutting down soon and fresh Firefox installs don't install its extension any more.

Which kinda makes sense. It was actually cool when it could save webpages for later reading offline (camping, airplane). Once it lost that feature, there's nothing left but bookmarks.

This is the most disappointing part for me—Pocket could sync with Kobo e-readers for offline, e-paper reading later. Great for traveling.

I have been using the extension SingleFile to save pages for offline reading and archival for ages. I started using it on the basis of reading something online and later talk to someone about it and when i try to find it again, it may be gone, dont find it, etc. So i started to save all the relevant pages to have a local reference of what i have read online.

What is the reason for criticizing Mozilla for integrating a new feature into their browser? Or am I misunderstanding the term feature, and Pocket isn't a feature for you? I mean, other browsers like Chrome have similar functionality.

Mozilla does a lot of projects that I don’t really understand, but I also don’t really see anything wrong with the browser.

The problem with the Internet is that people keep coming up with new standards and sites keep getting infected by JavaScript. Firefox itself has been fine for ages, it is just connecting us to something that gets shittier every day.

I was surprised to hit this one today. Government department, supporting exactly one browser on most people's main device.

https://www.ato.gov.au/online-services/technical-support/min...

  > my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops.

My MacBook Air routinely will have 200-300 before I purge. Getting better at keeping under 100 but yeah...

My Linux desktop is hooked up to my TV[0] and currently has over 100 YouTube tabs open. I'm going to watch those math videos, I swear, I'm just tired right now and so want to watch garbage.

I do have ublock origin on both machines and some stricter privacy settings, maybe that's it? But otherwise yeah, FF is just as snappy as chrome. Which I do use regularly when on other people's machines.

[0] it's a movie server, gaming machine, and for everything else there's ssh and ydotool (I wish Apple would let me make better iPhone scripts than Shortcuts allows. Shortcuts makes me want to throw my phone against a wall...)

I stopped having the same issue of 100s of tabs of "math videos that I was going to watch one day" when I started saving them in my private playlists. Now I just have 100s of videos in playlists that I just look at longingly but never watch.

lol I tried that once.

What works best for me now is to do my best at putting tabs in the correct group tbh most gather while debugging and then I can just kill the group when I'm done.

Problem is the ADHD and groups get contaminated. Mostly a few casualties is actually fine but sometimes the group gets too mixed. Eventually I nuke it all

100% agree. I've used FF since version 1.x, but I've used Chrome as a secondary at times, and I've had more problems in Chrome than FF. In fact, I've literally never experienced a bug in FF, except for, prior to and in the early days of the Servo Rust rewrite, I had a few crashes (tabs all reopened upon restarting). I haven't even had a crash in probably 8 years. Chrome is just spyware trash, IMHO.

Same, no problems here, in the almost 20 years I've been using it.

Whenever I've used Chrome I find it weird and annoying. Which just goes to show it's all down to what you're used to.

If people would just try switching they'd find it normal in just a week or so. Are you really going to let Google control your computing just because you can't stand the very mild discomfort associated with change?

>Are you really going to let Google control your computing just because you can't stand the very mild discomfort associated with change?

Exactly that's the big picture question and I find it mind-boggling when when people can't look past an idiosyncratic user experience to more fundamental things like Google seizing long-term control over web standards, getting rid of ad block, imposing DRM, and creating a paradigm or even its own competitors are increasingly dependent on Chromium development.

> there's occasionally sites that have bugs because, like was the case in the 90s with Internet Explorer

Hol up! Are you saying Chrome is the new Internet Explorer?

I'm being facetious...

If so, then I agree. I have said and thought for a long time a lot of developers go all-in with everything google as if google could do no wrong. In short, they have become that which they swore to destroy.

Every Firefox post has people claiming problems with it that are literally not true.

Or if true, extremely idiosyncratic. This thread is one of the more amazing case studies for people making blanket generalizations from problems that seem to be very specific to their setups and hard to reproduce elsewhere. I don't want to say the problems aren't happening, but there seems to be a wild overconfidence in generalizing from unusual case scenarios.

Of course it's not limited to Firefox. I think it happens with everything from people's first experiences of Mastodon, to people having random bad experiences on some particular Linux distribution to any number of other things.

I think to me the most have spending one I saw was people insisting F-Droid had problems that I could never reproduce when I was using it simultaneously across like four or five devices, including a pixel C tablet with lineage OS, and old Nexus 7 also with lineage OS, and two of my phones as I was in the process of transitioning from one to the other.

there's also a lot of straight up liars, to be clear

>the most have spending

Oops, meant to say most head spinning. Speech to text strikes again.

> Much of what we said about Web Extensions support on desktop Orion stands, with further limitations in the scope of APIs we can support which are imposed by Apple. This results in a smaller number of extensions that are currently fully functional on iOS and iPadOS.

This seems to say they do not expect to actually get to full coverage on iOS like the author is talking about? https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ios-ipados-ex...

> I've never felt impeded by loading speeds

Even if this was an issue I had noticed (which I hadn't), now that's out the door because no ad blocker in Chrome, so good luck loading all the ads and trackers before getting your content...

I can't believe people keep parroting that... Even if 'chrome is faster and more responsive than firefox' was not a controversial statement (and it very much is), 'chrome with ads is fast' is outright laughable...

I will say that it is amusing that loading speeds is the argument for sticking with Chrome. Chrome loads faster so that you can see all of those ads faster and have to take the time to close each one of them, hehe!

If the slop doesn't bother you, stick with Chrome. Plenty of people still watch network/cable TV.

There is only one website with a weird issue for me in Firefox: chatgpt.com of all things.

When I open it and start typing, it resets the cursor position to the beginning after I already typed a few words. I assume this is some Next weirdness which requires a hack that only happens to work in Chrome.

I half suspect w/ UBO, any Firefox slowdowns would still beat Chrome with ads. I personally haven't had issues, I do actually use safari as my main (Mac user), but Firefox gets a lot of use on my Mac and PC and it hasn't been noticeably slower than chrome for me.

I use Firefox and Chrome to separate work from personal, and I can tell you that I have to close and restart Firefox at least once a day due to spinning fans and crawling performance, whereas with Chrome it's about once a week.

Since we're sharing our respective anecdotes your experience, interestingly mirrors mine in that I do the same thing for work. Microsoft Edge for work tasks (not my choice but the IT team remotely manages the bookmarks on that one), Firefox for personal. But no issues with speed or needing to shut things down just on an ordinary Lenovo laptop.

For another anecdotal experience, I use both in the same way and never have to restart neither of them until they ask to restart because of updates. Chrome asks much more often.

> My wimply little MacBook Pro

How old is it? Is a MacBook Pro wimpy now?

A 2012 Macbook Pro is going to be, yeah.

I used one quite recently. It’s no wimp for web browsing. Basically unnoticeable save for the constant warmth from this machine. It is still 2.5ghz per core after all, that’s not a complete slouch.

I just switched from Firefox to Chromium and it is much faster. I switch back and forth.

100 tabs? Step aside, buddy. I have currently around ~2000 tabs. Firefox is a beast.

Where does the article mention anything about loading speed?

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