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Comment by 6cxs2hd6 | Hacker News Reader

I'm really looking forward to the overhaul on the road map that moves more things off the main UI thread.

I keep switching from Chrome to Firefox for reasons of principle ... and keep switching back to Chrome for reasons of performance. I hate myself, but can't help it. Firefox will briefly freeze scrolling a long page. Firefox will beach ball for 15 seconds after resuming laptop from sleep. And so on. None of it is crash/burn awful, but it adds up to be just irritating enough that it makes me mental. I tolerate it until I can't (for a couple weeks), then switch back to Chrome. Just did so yesterday, which is why I'm ranting in response to this headline.

This on OS X. Couple years ago when I was using Windows 7 all the time, Firefox was great. IME the fit/finish on OS X is not the same.

tl;dr: Firefox, I want to love you and be exclusive. Please change.

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Firefox will beach ball for 15 seconds after resuming laptop from sleep.

That really doesn’t sound like normal behaviour? Have you tried the ‘Reset Firefox’ button on about:support? More info at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-preferences-fix-p...

Reset is not really an option when you have your chosen extensions installed and customized.

Considering extensions are the #2 reason (behind Flash) that Firefox crashes/beachballs, perhaps one would be wise to audit the (presumably) tons of extensions they have installed locally, to see if they conflict with other extensions?

Actually a handful of essential extensions (in my case those essential one for web dev) are enough to bring it down on my under-powered laptop.

If what you're saying is true, then your handful of extensions are conflicting with each other. disable one of the handful, and see if the crashes disappear. if not, disable another one.

currently using a netbook with an Atom N570. I appreciate under-powered computing. Firefox runs fine here with 5 extensions (two of which are for web development). 17 tabs are using 214.52 MB of memory. haven't had a crash or hang in a long time.

I could've written this myself. I love Firefox and I used it for years but at some point it became rather unusable and after it forgot which tabs I had pinned as app tabs for the fifth or so time (because I had to kill a completely unresponsive Firefox, this happened often) I was angry enough to actually give Chrome a try. It is SO much more responsive, even just the UI. I've kept Firefox up-to-date but I don't want to keep switching back and forth so I haven't made a switch back. I hope I'll get to, though.

This is all on a Windows 7 machine though, rather than OSX.

Firefox has come so far from the memory hogging 4.0 days. Like others here, I give it a shot ever few month and UI responsiveness always sends me back to Chrome. The resurrected electrolysis project can’t come soon enough.

The irony is what use to be its greatest flaw, memory usage/leaks, is now it's greatest strength. Around Chrome 15+ memory usage started ballooning and was too much for my 2GB netbook. A laggy UI is much better than an unresponsive system from thrashing RAM.

Yeah, I don't mind big memory usage per se. I have tons of RAM, 8GB in fact. Take 1 if you need it, if it results in a responsive application. Chrome uses something like that right now. But if I hit ctrl-t on Chrome, I INSTANTLY get a new tab. Firefox lacks that. You see Firefox moan and sweat for a few seconds, and then poop out that new tab you ordered. But that's not the worst thing: the worst thing is that it would occasionally (say once every 2 weeks) crash and upon restart completely have forgotten what tabs I had open and that is a pet peeve of mine. I want it to be more reliable.

> crash and upon restart completely have forgotten what tabs I had open

I've run into some strange behavior like this before too. When you reopen Firefox and its lost your session, try opening another window or two and see if 'Restore Previous Session' is finally available.

If that didn't work, there are also a few other tools that can help solve restoring your sessionstore.js:

Firefox Sessionstore.js fixer

http://thepanz.netsons.org/post/firefox-sessionstore-js-fixe...

What if Firefox loses your tabs ?

http://dag.wieers.com/blog/what-if-firefox-loses-your-tabs

On Nightly it's even better, it's aggressively compacting memory, it was running around 30% (2GB total) instead of 40+ a few weeks ago. Kudos for their effort. I wish they could replicate a tiny bit of it toward the GUI.

If you don't know already, a huge UI overhaul is planned to land sometimes between Firefox 25 or 26 [0]. As far as I know, better performance is a big reason for the change as well.

[0] https://people.mozilla.com/~shorlander/ux-presentation/ux-pr...

I didn't know they were trying to fix performance too. To me this was only a UX redesign. Which I tried not long ago, and I was disappointed, it doesn't add much actually. A few theme changes here and there, a nice configurable menu that personally I'll never use. I'm not sure what to think about it ... we'll see.

Really? I switched from Chrome to Firefox because the Firefox is way faster on my MacBook. Do you have any heavy mods installed?

For me it has been the same, happy to be back in Firefox.

Yup, I have very similar problems.

Google+ is a great example - it slows to a crawl after a few minutes of browsing - it particularly becomes unusable when I scroll down and it loads more content via AJAX.

I'm on Xubuntu 13.04.

Reminds me of early web when Microsoft's websites always worked a lot better in IE than other browsers. And maybe they still do.

Still do, particularly their partner pages. Chrome's basically a no-go, while Firefox is usually functional if not pretty.

Well, I am on Windows 7 and it is fine enough but at times, it does get slow. I also keep changing between Chrome and Firefox. Chrome just feels way faster.

Apart from that, Chrome has very nice features that make life easier.

The PDF preview of Chrome is great. It can rival the PDF viewers on desktops easily. Heck, it helped once when I had to get a printout at a shop and they didn't have PDF Reader installed. I just dropped PDF onto Chrome and we had a PDF reader that could print. I know about PDF.js but it is not so good!

Next, the UI could be improved. Firefox has its upsides as well. I love the hidden status bar. I have dropped all my extension icons there. Now, with one shortcut, they are accessible and for normal browsing, don't come in between. But Chrome's way of managing extension icons is great, and one thing that particulary drives mad with FF is that there are no visible zoom controls. I have been using it on and off for a year now but I still don't know how to find if I'm zoomed in or not.

Chrome has really good Flash integration and I didn't know that I did not have Flash Player installed till I started using Firefox. What is stopping them from bundling a plugin like Chrome?

I use PDF.js in FF it seems fine for a PDF reader. Its integrated and reasonably fast

Well, I'm a student and lot of searching for me ends on PDFs. Some with figures etc. are broken and display fine in Chrome. FF is good but Chrome is much better, that was comparison I was making!

I have a 1.07GHz Core-i5 laptop (with Nvidia Optimus) at home and 3GHz Core-i5 desktop at work. I happily use Firefox (Aurora) at work, but at home I have to use Chrome because Firefox is simply way too laggy (it improves a bit when run with Nvidia).

Same boat. I switched recently (when switching feed readers!) and cannot believe how lousy the performance is and inelegant the UI. Very jerky scrolling, flashes to re-render CSS, beachballs, stalls, ancient UI paradigms...

After using chrome and even safari, the UI feels so "thick". I think maybe a release or 3 focused entirely on performance and UI cleaning may be in order.

I love firefox too. But for me it always starts slowing down half way through the day (about the same time as I do). Maybe its firebug? This has happened on windows and mac. Restarting it makes it work better, like myself after lunch.

Its still my favorite browser though.

Go to about:memory then click the "Minimize memory usage" button.

P.S. If anyone knows how to add that button to the FF toolbar, I would consider you a minor deity for at least a whole day.

Interesting. What does pressing that button actually do?

If you hover that button with your mouse pointer you can read the following explanation:

Send three "heap-minimize" notifications in a row. Each notification triggers a global garbage collection followed by a cycle collection, and causes the process to reduce memory usage in other ways, e.g. by flushing various caches.

Firebug can definitely slow down the browser. You can try browsing for a while without it, perhaps using a separate profile.

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