3 ms·

Oh how I wish Mozilla would just slap basic browser chrome on and ship the thing. Firefox used to be a fast browser, nowadays after a couple hours it takes 30s

by iSnow 11y ago

Oh how I wish Mozilla would just slap basic browser chrome on and ship the thing. Firefox used to be a fast browser, nowadays after a couple hours it takes 30s to open a new window on my 32GB machine and 10s to register a link click and start loading the page. I am in my peer group the last Firefox guy standing, but not for much longer, I fear.

dblohm7 11y ago
We'd love it if you submitted some profiling data: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance/Reporting_a_Performance_Problem https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance...
- iSnow 11y ago
  Is there a way to do it on the bog-standard Firefox? I can't use a nightly on my company's work machine.
grayrest 11y ago
I compile Servo twice per week or so to check out the progress. It's really not ready to go as a daily browser. You can load pages, they're recognizable but generally not fully correct, the form input fields are rudimentary, and it crashes every time I go back to the previous page. There's been one proof of concept basic chrome [1] and it wouldn't be THAT difficult to build a more robust one but I'd be much more interested in seeing it running in Electron so you could run Atom or VS Code since the domains are much more limited and rendering perf is a fairly significant limiting factor in those apps. [1] https://github.com/glennw/servo-shell https://github.com/glennw/servo-shell P.S. I've never had perf issues with Firefox like you're talking about. You might want to try cleaning out your profile and if it's not that, you might have addons doing something screwy.
- Manishearth 11y ago
  https://github.com/browserhtml/browser.html https://github.com/browserhtml/browser.html works fine as a basic chrome too. Could you expand on "form input fields are rudimentary"? (I know they are, I'm wondering what part of this you're referring to). Is it the styling, lack of selection support, lack of HTML5 input fields, bugs, or something else? (I might be looking into improving these later) The "go back" crash is something that can be fixed easily; I think we know why it happens but haven't fixed it yet (I forgot the reason though).
  - grayrest 11y ago
    > Could you expand on "form input fields are rudimentary"? All of the above except the lack of HTML5 fields. :) I don't mean to be negative, just to give reasons it's not as simple as "just slap chrome on it". I really should start contributing.
    - Manishearth 11y ago
      Yeah, no I get it :) Thanks for the feedback.
- iSnow 11y ago
  I have done the profile cleaning routing (I think that's something like the defragmentation runs of old...) and disabled all add-ons except for uBlock, Reddit Enhancement Suite and greasemonkey (for a total of 3 GM scripts). I don't understand what's up either, but I have it both on my Windows work machine with a 4+4 core desktop CPU and 32GB RAM and my Macbook with 16GB. After a couple of hours, I can type in a text-field and see the text lagging. On a 2.4Ghz machine. I do have lots of tabs open, but since they only load on activation I doubt that's the reason. Maybe it's the Web Telegram app. It's totally frustrating that I am not even able to find the culprit if there's one since not even the dev tools have something like `ps -aux` to show what the tabs are consuming. Granted, it's gotten better with v.45, but still I just hope something useful comes out of Servo, and soon.
  - mook 11y ago
    Try going to about:memory to see if some tab is taking up a lot of memory. I've got this CI system where if I leave it open overnight it takes a gig or two and makes the browser unusable (Firefox and Chrome; it's a problem with DOM elements). If your GM scripts retain DOM elements for a long time (and the tabs aren't closed) that might be an issue too.
Manishearth 11y ago
Servo's not production-ready yet. "A good browser chrome" is not the blocker for this; browser.html is already a good enough "basic browser chrome".
barrkel 11y ago
On my Windows machine, firefox.exe has been running since 14th of February, and I'd estimate it takes less than 2 seconds between Ctrl+N and registering me typing in the default home page search box. Of course, Ctrl+T is much faster. Among my extensions are Classic Theme Restorer, Cookie Controller, FireGestures, RefControl, Status-4-Evar, Tab Mix Plus, Tree Style Tab, uBlock Origin, FoxyProxy amongst several others - this isn't a lightweight installation. Chrome isn't competitive with Firefox + Tree Style Tabs, so there's little risk of me switching any time soon.
acdha 11y ago
Have you tried running without any extensions after having reset Firefox? The only time I've seen that where it wasn't a dying hard drive or a malware-infested/corporate IT-mismanaged system was when someone had some particularly poorly-optimized extensions installed. I was curious & ran a couple of tests on this 2010 Mac Book Air. Normal launch time according to about:healthreport is 2.8 seconds and testing with something like `open -a Firefox https://www.google.com` https://www.google.com` when Firefox was not already running takes 4-5 seconds to finish rendering. When it is already running, it's under a second from start to finish.

by iSnow 11y ago

dblohm7 11y ago

We'd love it if you submitted some profiling data: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance/Reporting_a_Performance_Problem https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance...

iSnow 11y ago
Is there a way to do it on the bog-standard Firefox? I can't use a nightly on my company's work machine.

grayrest 11y ago

I compile Servo twice per week or so to check out the progress. It's really not ready to go as a daily browser. You can load pages, they're recognizable but generally not fully correct, the form input fields are rudimentary, and it crashes every time I go back to the previous page. There's been one proof of concept basic chrome [1] and it wouldn't be THAT difficult to build a more robust one but I'd be much more interested in seeing it running in Electron so you could run Atom or VS Code since the domains are much more limited and rendering perf is a fairly significant limiting factor in those apps. [1] https://github.com/glennw/servo-shell https://github.com/glennw/servo-shell P.S. I've never had perf issues with Firefox like you're talking about. You might want to try cleaning out your profile and if it's not that, you might have addons doing something screwy.

Manishearth 11y ago
https://github.com/browserhtml/browser.html https://github.com/browserhtml/browser.html works fine as a basic chrome too. Could you expand on "form input fields are rudimentary"? (I know they are, I'm wondering what part of this you're referring to). Is it the styling, lack of selection support, lack of HTML5 input fields, bugs, or something else? (I might be looking into improving these later) The "go back" crash is something that can be fixed easily; I think we know why it happens but haven't fixed it yet (I forgot the reason though).
- grayrest 11y ago
  > Could you expand on "form input fields are rudimentary"? All of the above except the lack of HTML5 fields. :) I don't mean to be negative, just to give reasons it's not as simple as "just slap chrome on it". I really should start contributing.
  - Manishearth 11y ago
    Yeah, no I get it :) Thanks for the feedback.
iSnow 11y ago
I have done the profile cleaning routing (I think that's something like the defragmentation runs of old...) and disabled all add-ons except for uBlock, Reddit Enhancement Suite and greasemonkey (for a total of 3 GM scripts). I don't understand what's up either, but I have it both on my Windows work machine with a 4+4 core desktop CPU and 32GB RAM and my Macbook with 16GB. After a couple of hours, I can type in a text-field and see the text lagging. On a 2.4Ghz machine. I do have lots of tabs open, but since they only load on activation I doubt that's the reason. Maybe it's the Web Telegram app. It's totally frustrating that I am not even able to find the culprit if there's one since not even the dev tools have something like `ps -aux` to show what the tabs are consuming. Granted, it's gotten better with v.45, but still I just hope something useful comes out of Servo, and soon.
- mook 11y ago
  Try going to about:memory to see if some tab is taking up a lot of memory. I've got this CI system where if I leave it open overnight it takes a gig or two and makes the browser unusable (Firefox and Chrome; it's a problem with DOM elements). If your GM scripts retain DOM elements for a long time (and the tabs aren't closed) that might be an issue too.

Manishearth 11y ago

Servo's not production-ready yet. "A good browser chrome" is not the blocker for this; browser.html is already a good enough "basic browser chrome".

barrkel 11y ago

On my Windows machine, firefox.exe has been running since 14th of February, and I'd estimate it takes less than 2 seconds between Ctrl+N and registering me typing in the default home page search box. Of course, Ctrl+T is much faster. Among my extensions are Classic Theme Restorer, Cookie Controller, FireGestures, RefControl, Status-4-Evar, Tab Mix Plus, Tree Style Tab, uBlock Origin, FoxyProxy amongst several others - this isn't a lightweight installation. Chrome isn't competitive with Firefox + Tree Style Tabs, so there's little risk of me switching any time soon.

acdha 11y ago

Have you tried running without any extensions after having reset Firefox? The only time I've seen that where it wasn't a dying hard drive or a malware-infested/corporate IT-mismanaged system was when someone had some particularly poorly-optimized extensions installed. I was curious & ran a couple of tests on this 2010 Mac Book Air. Normal launch time according to about:healthreport is 2.8 seconds and testing with something like `open -a Firefox https://www.google.com` https://www.google.com` when Firefox was not already running takes 4-5 seconds to finish rendering. When it is already running, it's under a second from start to finish.