3 ms·

> Firefox also has a reputation for being slow, gotten probably from people doing ridiculous things as keeping tens of tabs open and not restarting it for dayes

by mcintyre1994 10y ago

> Firefox also has a reputation for being slow, gotten probably from people doing ridiculous things as keeping tens of tabs open and not restarting it for dayes Do you mean it has the reputation from people doing this 5 or 10 years ago and it's stuck? Or is this still a problem for Firefox?

Zancarius 10y ago
In my use case, it's still a problem if you have a bunch of tabs loaded, but I think the class of problem is somewhat different than it is in, say, Chrome. Sure, Firefox gets a bit sluggish with 500-700 tabs open, but since I don't have a habit of keeping a single session open for days (then it IS a problem), the net effect is relatively small since restarting Firefox generally behaves as if the inactive tabs from the last session weren't open. Obviously, if you click through tabs you opened previously, then it'll load them but otherwise it's fine. So there's some truth to it, but as with most things, it depends. I use Firefox mostly because I have a terrible habit of clicking any link that looks remotely interesting with the intent to come back to it for later reading. Granted, it rarely works quite like that, but Chrome became a bear after 150-200 tabs (and often started capping my RAM). For all its faults, Firefox (again, in my use case) still manages to stay around ~2GiB unless I do something stupid or watch a bunch of YouTube videos (under Linux). Chrome does well, but the UI became unusable since you couldn't scroll through opened tabs without having specialized addons and such. I'm not sure if this is still the case, and even if it's changed, I don't think I'd go back. The RAM usage was too much, but I fully understand Chrome was probably never designed with my browsing habits in mind. Whereas I've seen claims that allege a handful of Firefox developers are tabholics. I'd believe it. Somewhat off-topic: One thing I really like about Firefox is the profile manager. I've started creating separate profiles for general browsing, documentation, and videos sometimes with extensions tailored for each. It was a slight pain to change my habits around to accommodate that, but I've noticed if one instance hangs, it's not much of a problem. With multiprocesses on the horizon, maybe this will cause me to change my browsing habits again, but I think I like the profile isolation for enough reasons unrelated to performance to continue as is. Perhaps this is abusing it somewhat, but it works for me. If you keep a relatively clean profile with few tabs open, Firefox stays pretty snappy.
rndgermandude 10y ago
Firefox developers did a lot of work in the recent years to reduce memory use and leaks (MemShrink) and visual stutter (jank), and e10s will improve the latter even further (while regressing memory use a bit). However, Firefox will not magically better itself; developers - paid and volunteer - will need to fix issues as they are discovered, and that means that if you run into performance problems, you should file a good bug. I use both Chrome and Firefox on my Windows 7 box, simultaneously for various reasons. The Chrome (vanilla install except for uBlock Origin) performance is... not great for me, at least once I get more than 10-15 tabs open, mostly when switching and/or opening tabs. A lot of it seems to be swap-thrashing. Firefox performance on the other hand is OK to great, even tho it being my main browser with usually 50+ tabs open (with tons of overlap with those Chrome tabs) and rather add-on laden. I am using Nightly since forever, with e10s off at the moment because of one or two add-ons that would fail otherwise; tho I also have Firefox Stable installed and when I use that it behaves the same. Sure, webgl and/or js benchmarks might be a little behind on Firefox (tho not by a large margin). So that nifty html5/webgl 3D ego shooter might perform a little worse, but that is nothing I personally really care about. Firefox excels for me for regular browsing performance, and that is what I want. Chrome on OSX always performed abysmal for some reason, so I am using Firefox (Nightly) exclusively on a recent MacBook Pro, which runs fine (sans the occasional memory swap/uncompress stutter when switching back to really old tab that got paged out). I cannot comment much about startup performance as I usually have long-running sessions in the order of days or weeks, but it seems OK for both browsers.

Zancarius 10y ago

In my use case, it's still a problem if you have a bunch of tabs loaded, but I think the class of problem is somewhat different than it is in, say, Chrome. Sure, Firefox gets a bit sluggish with 500-700 tabs open, but since I don't have a habit of keeping a single session open for days (then it IS a problem), the net effect is relatively small since restarting Firefox generally behaves as if the inactive tabs from the last session weren't open. Obviously, if you click through tabs you opened previously, then it'll load them but otherwise it's fine. So there's some truth to it, but as with most things, it depends. I use Firefox mostly because I have a terrible habit of clicking any link that looks remotely interesting with the intent to come back to it for later reading. Granted, it rarely works quite like that, but Chrome became a bear after 150-200 tabs (and often started capping my RAM). For all its faults, Firefox (again, in my use case) still manages to stay around ~2GiB unless I do something stupid or watch a bunch of YouTube videos (under Linux). Chrome does well, but the UI became unusable since you couldn't scroll through opened tabs without having specialized addons and such. I'm not sure if this is still the case, and even if it's changed, I don't think I'd go back. The RAM usage was too much, but I fully understand Chrome was probably never designed with my browsing habits in mind. Whereas I've seen claims that allege a handful of Firefox developers are tabholics. I'd believe it. Somewhat off-topic: One thing I really like about Firefox is the profile manager. I've started creating separate profiles for general browsing, documentation, and videos sometimes with extensions tailored for each. It was a slight pain to change my habits around to accommodate that, but I've noticed if one instance hangs, it's not much of a problem. With multiprocesses on the horizon, maybe this will cause me to change my browsing habits again, but I think I like the profile isolation for enough reasons unrelated to performance to continue as is. Perhaps this is abusing it somewhat, but it works for me. If you keep a relatively clean profile with few tabs open, Firefox stays pretty snappy.

rndgermandude 10y ago

Firefox developers did a lot of work in the recent years to reduce memory use and leaks (MemShrink) and visual stutter (jank), and e10s will improve the latter even further (while regressing memory use a bit). However, Firefox will not magically better itself; developers - paid and volunteer - will need to fix issues as they are discovered, and that means that if you run into performance problems, you should file a good bug. I use both Chrome and Firefox on my Windows 7 box, simultaneously for various reasons. The Chrome (vanilla install except for uBlock Origin) performance is... not great for me, at least once I get more than 10-15 tabs open, mostly when switching and/or opening tabs. A lot of it seems to be swap-thrashing. Firefox performance on the other hand is OK to great, even tho it being my main browser with usually 50+ tabs open (with tons of overlap with those Chrome tabs) and rather add-on laden. I am using Nightly since forever, with e10s off at the moment because of one or two add-ons that would fail otherwise; tho I also have Firefox Stable installed and when I use that it behaves the same. Sure, webgl and/or js benchmarks might be a little behind on Firefox (tho not by a large margin). So that nifty html5/webgl 3D ego shooter might perform a little worse, but that is nothing I personally really care about. Firefox excels for me for regular browsing performance, and that is what I want. Chrome on OSX always performed abysmal for some reason, so I am using Firefox (Nightly) exclusively on a recent MacBook Pro, which runs fine (sans the occasional memory swap/uncompress stutter when switching back to really old tab that got paged out). I cannot comment much about startup performance as I usually have long-running sessions in the order of days or weeks, but it seems OK for both browsers.