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Comment by f00 | Hacker News Reader

Argh. I want to love Firefox 3.5. Really, I do. Modern web standards. Faster. Smaller memory footprint. Native Aqua widgets (effing _finally_).

The problem is, compared to Chrome and Safari, it's a dog.

I've been running the nightly (Shiretoko) for weeks now, and, like everyone else, I'm hopelessly addicted to various extensions during heavy browsing sessions (development, etc).. but when I want to pop up a browser, check something quickly, and move on with my life, Safari is the browser of choice. The initial launch speed and JS performance are orders of magnitude faster.

Gecko is a great layout engine, but my gut feeling is that XUL and friends are holding it back. Agree? Disagree?

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It's even worse on Linux. FF performance on Ubuntu/Gnome was pretty bad. Starting up, scrolling and even window resizing made me feel like I was using a Pentium II. I want back to OSX+Safari. I only fire up FF when I need Firebug.

On the other hand, FF on Windows is blazing fast. So I doubt it's just XUL.

Edit: wow, they did Safari-like pixel-precise touchpad scrolling (OSX). Very nice.

Same here, I've been running the Firefox 3.5 RC's on my Gentoo x86 system for a few days now, and it just keeps crashing, at least once every 5 minutes. Opera, even the 10.00 Unite Alpha (which is what I'm using), is just so much faster and stable.

I've been using Firefox 3.5 and it's fast and hasn't crashed at all unlike Opera which crashed every once in a while here on Ubuntu Karmic.

I haven't worked in a Windows-based environment in a while, but I do recall in the Fx 2.x days that it was significantly faster on Windows. Perhaps this is just a case of Mozilla catering to the largest audience.

If that's the case, then I applaud the effort, as getting the masses moved from IE[6/7/8] to Firefox 3.5 is certainly a more valuable effort than besting Safari performance on Mac OS X. There's just a big part of me that hopes they can achieve both. :-)

I've been running firefox 3.5 release candidates for the past couple weeks, and its been pretty fast and it hasn't crashed at all

I run FF on Debian (iceweasel), and it is acceptably snappy, but there is a bit of a trick to this:

1. Every extension you add seems to decrease performance by 30-50% (rough numbers) [1]. So live with a bare essential set of extensions. For me that is Firebug and FlashBlock.

2. Keeping very many bookmarks or history items seems to destroy performance, particularly with the "awesome bar." I disable history completely and have it clear everything else on browser close.

Before I settled on this FF usage technique, FF would degrade in performance over the course of months as it built up data in the profile. Eventually it would become unusable [2] until I deleted the profile and started fresh. Now I just prevent it from building up any data.

[1] As much as I used to like this extension, my experience has been that ForecastFox in particular hammers browser performance.

[2] It would take seconds, sometimes 10 or more, to open a new tab to about:blank. With this technique though, I currently have ~ 25 tabs open, and new tab creation is instantaneous.

Or you could just run Firefox completely in RAM in Linux, as I do:

http://webupd8.blogspot.com/2009/05/speed-up-firefox-by-moun...

It's fairly easy. There's a guide just for Ubuntu, too:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=991205

I wish the OS was smart enough to do this automatically. I have 16GB of RAM on my workstation, and rarely use more than 8GB.

> Keeping very many bookmarks or history items seems to destroy performance...

Amen to that. I have ~12,000 bookmarks, and FF3 on Windows takes ~10 seconds to both start up and shut down.

Why would you have that many bookmarks? Trying to make search engines obsolete?

> Why would you have that many bookmarks?

Why shouldn't I? Firefox 2 handled it fine.

It is exactly the same with chrome. I used to love it until it ended up being a dog in performance. I honestly thought it was because I started using the dev builds - slow debug logging?

BUT, I clear everything but saved passwords every month or so. It goes back to being snappy right away. You don't get those results even with a new install as it doesn't delete old data.

I think the chrome team must have known this. In the clear history dialog it lets you clear only "last week", month, etc which is perfect. I wish they would automate that though.

Interesting. I'm writing this using Iceweasel 3.0.9 on Debian testing (Squeeze/Sid) on an IBM T60 Thinkpad, 2Ghz dual-core, 2GB of RAM. I currently have 8 add-ons installed and a large amount of favourites and history saved. My profile is quite old and I never clear my history or have to do any special tending to keep performance at a constant.

Iceweasel is slower to start than would be ideal, really it's always been so but certain add-ons definitely seem to affect start-up time. But I've never experienced any of these more extreme issues that I hear a large number of people reporting. Nor have I experienced these kinds of issues on any of my other machines (running Windows XP and OS X Leopard on these machines and their resources were/are similar to or better than my T60). I wonder why this is? Is it because I'm not running Iceweasel/FF on a single core machine with < 1GB of RAM?

For the people who are having issues with Iceweasel/FF, what are the resources on your machines like? I totally believe you guys that these issues exist, I've read too many reports to doubt them all, I just wonder why I've never experienced them.

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/browser-benchmarks-2-even-wi...

I use the "Boss Key" extension (press a key and hides the window). This hides the current window, but not future windows. If I click the Firefox icon again, it comes up as fast as opening a new window.

You close your web browser?

Edit: Was this downmodded by people who actually close their browser during the day? Those that don't should up-mod it.

You were likely downmodded because a one-line question question doesn't really add to the discussion. Also, telling people to upmod your comment just because they do something you do isn't helping you.

It's a valid question. The browser is the gateway to most of the applications I use in a day. Closing it down would be like shutting down my computer whenever I step away from it.

I don't disagree that applications (and operating systems) should start up quickly, but it hardly seems like a critical complaint. And, as much as I appreciate improved Javascript performance, the differences are not that significant in the real-world.

You don't necessarily up/down people on HN because you agree or disagree with them. It's about contributing to discussion.

Sadly, asking questions is apparently considered "not contributing". Very friendly.

It depends on the question. The parent poster obviously closes his browser, otherwise load time wouldn't matter for him.

Furthermore, your question calls for a yes/no answer, which is hardly contributing to the conversation.

As for the why he closes the browser, I don't know. Maybe RAM scarcity... But it isn't wonderfully interesting to have that kind of anecdotal conversations here.

If I want the RAM back, yes. FF bloats overnight, as well.

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