4 ms·

I've noticed this also. Gmail or anything by Google within Firefox is painful. Very very painful.

by c16 8y ago

lostmyoldone 8y ago
Read in another HN comment just the other day that the slowness was because they used some obsolete only-in-chrome shadow DOM API which "polyfilled" on all other browser, which if true sounds exactly like pulling a Microsoft. I haven't verified it myself and I couldn't find a reference with a quick search, so while it sounds plausible, it would be great to havd a credible source to refer to.
- tumetab1 8y ago
  Some kind of reference https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18053935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18053935
- the_duke 8y ago
  This is not necessarily malicious though. Probably some in-house framework they use that happens to use this old browser API. And they haven't gotten around to fixing it. Of course it's also reasonable that nobody is pushing a fix up because it works fine on Chrome and that's what Google wants us to use.
kannanvijayan 8y ago
Just a heads up, but we are actively working on improving the situation here, and should have releases coming out that steadily and progressively improves the experience on this front. It is an area of major focus after the initial Quantum Flow effort, and we have technical fixes in many places in the pipeline to address this. (I work on the Javascript engine in Firefox, and improving our story here is one of my personal top priorities, as well as an organizational priority).
- cptskippy 8y ago
  Are you saying that performance issues on Google properties are a bug in Firefox? The other posters were implying the issue was Google doing things to intentionally slow down performance in Firefox.
  - c16 8y ago
    Not stating Google is intentionally slowing down things - but I've noticed that Google products and only Google products are slow to render, slow to click into the search field of Google Maps, and when I press 'compose' within Gmail on a macbook pro 2017 I can wait easilly 10 seconds before the email bit pops up. Within Chrome however, quick and slick.
    - cptskippy 8y ago
      Google has a history of disabling or degrading features (image search, maps, youtube) in browsers that aren't Chrome under the "we haven't fully tested them" excuse. In almost all cases changing your user agent to Chrome would result in a perfectly functional site. Perhaps there is 1 feature that didn't work but it was usually obscure and it feels like Google was just throwing the baby out with the bathwater to spite anyone not using Chrome. Up until recently it felt like Google made a Chrome version of their product and a lowest common denominator version and anyone that isn't using Chrome got the later. Now it seems like they let some browsers use the Chrome version but there are unusual performance regressions compared to Chrome. It's very reminiscent of the first browser wars where sites were IE or Netscape only. The whole point of standards push over the years was so that developers could just code to the standard and the browsers would either catch up or suffer the consequences. It seems like these days Google is dipping into Microsoft's old playbook for every trick it can find to get people to switch to Chrome.
  - kannanvijayan 8y ago
    I'm not about to speak to the intent of programmers I haven't interacted with heavily. In these sorts of charged conversations there is often an impulse to make issues about "this" or "that" exclusively. I find it useful to avoid that impulse entirely and instead focus on what I can do to make things better.
- the_duke 8y ago
  Can you provide a few links to bugs for this? I'd love to know the technical reasons behind that.
- rstuart4133 8y ago
  If you want a site the is just horrible in Firefox Mobile, try: http://www.bom.gov.au/australia/meteye/ http://www.bom.gov.au/australia/meteye/ This is a Australian Government site, so there is no Google shenanigans going on here. You are meant to zoom in on a locality on the interactive map, and then pan around by dragging. Panning works fine in Chrome. The panning is so slow in Firefox Mobile it's unusable . (It's fine on Firefox desktop, but I'm guessing the shear horsepower available on a desktop CPU hides the problem). It's a bit sad, because it's a page I use a lot. Whatever it is, it effects a lot of similar pages.
squarefoot 8y ago
I have a Gmail account since it was invite only and I believe also there wasn't any web interface yet so I always used it through a mail client such as Sylpheed, now Claws Mail (https://www.claws-mail.org/ https://www.claws-mail.org/). The very few times i had to use the web interface (always Firefox or derivatives) it worked without hitches on FF too, but a few months ago I was doing some maintenance to a customer PC (Debian+Firefox just like all my machines) and noticed how slow the Gmail web interface had become. Switching to the "old" mode helped somewhat to restore some speed, but being used to snappy dedicated mail client it still was truly slow to operate. Unfortunately today every non tech savy user thinks the browser is the internet to the point some don't even know what the word browser mean, which makes even more difficult to convince them to try anything else. Where a browser struggles with two pages of mails, I can keep available my entire archive since about 2001 on the Claws Mail client, that's over 50K mails in a dozen accounts, and query them to find whatever I need.

I've noticed this also. Gmail or anything by Google within Firefox is painful. Very very painful.

by c16 8y ago

I've noticed this also. Gmail or anything by Google within Firefox is painful. Very very painful.

Read in another HN comment just the other day that the slowness was because they used some obsolete only-in-chrome shadow DOM API which "polyfilled" on all other browser, which if true sounds exactly like pulling a Microsoft. I haven't verified it myself and I couldn't find a reference with a quick search, so while it sounds plausible, it would be great to havd a credible source to refer to.

tumetab1 8y ago
Some kind of reference https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18053935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18053935
the_duke 8y ago
This is not necessarily malicious though. Probably some in-house framework they use that happens to use this old browser API. And they haven't gotten around to fixing it. Of course it's also reasonable that nobody is pushing a fix up because it works fine on Chrome and that's what Google wants us to use.

kannanvijayan 8y ago

Just a heads up, but we are actively working on improving the situation here, and should have releases coming out that steadily and progressively improves the experience on this front. It is an area of major focus after the initial Quantum Flow effort, and we have technical fixes in many places in the pipeline to address this. (I work on the Javascript engine in Firefox, and improving our story here is one of my personal top priorities, as well as an organizational priority).

cptskippy 8y ago
Are you saying that performance issues on Google properties are a bug in Firefox? The other posters were implying the issue was Google doing things to intentionally slow down performance in Firefox.
- c16 8y ago
  Not stating Google is intentionally slowing down things - but I've noticed that Google products and only Google products are slow to render, slow to click into the search field of Google Maps, and when I press 'compose' within Gmail on a macbook pro 2017 I can wait easilly 10 seconds before the email bit pops up. Within Chrome however, quick and slick.
  - cptskippy 8y ago
    Google has a history of disabling or degrading features (image search, maps, youtube) in browsers that aren't Chrome under the "we haven't fully tested them" excuse. In almost all cases changing your user agent to Chrome would result in a perfectly functional site. Perhaps there is 1 feature that didn't work but it was usually obscure and it feels like Google was just throwing the baby out with the bathwater to spite anyone not using Chrome. Up until recently it felt like Google made a Chrome version of their product and a lowest common denominator version and anyone that isn't using Chrome got the later. Now it seems like they let some browsers use the Chrome version but there are unusual performance regressions compared to Chrome. It's very reminiscent of the first browser wars where sites were IE or Netscape only. The whole point of standards push over the years was so that developers could just code to the standard and the browsers would either catch up or suffer the consequences. It seems like these days Google is dipping into Microsoft's old playbook for every trick it can find to get people to switch to Chrome.
- kannanvijayan 8y ago
  I'm not about to speak to the intent of programmers I haven't interacted with heavily. In these sorts of charged conversations there is often an impulse to make issues about "this" or "that" exclusively. I find it useful to avoid that impulse entirely and instead focus on what I can do to make things better.
the_duke 8y ago
Can you provide a few links to bugs for this? I'd love to know the technical reasons behind that.
rstuart4133 8y ago
If you want a site the is just horrible in Firefox Mobile, try: http://www.bom.gov.au/australia/meteye/ http://www.bom.gov.au/australia/meteye/ This is a Australian Government site, so there is no Google shenanigans going on here. You are meant to zoom in on a locality on the interactive map, and then pan around by dragging. Panning works fine in Chrome. The panning is so slow in Firefox Mobile it's unusable . (It's fine on Firefox desktop, but I'm guessing the shear horsepower available on a desktop CPU hides the problem). It's a bit sad, because it's a page I use a lot. Whatever it is, it effects a lot of similar pages.

squarefoot 8y ago

I have a Gmail account since it was invite only and I believe also there wasn't any web interface yet so I always used it through a mail client such as Sylpheed, now Claws Mail (https://www.claws-mail.org/ https://www.claws-mail.org/). The very few times i had to use the web interface (always Firefox or derivatives) it worked without hitches on FF too, but a few months ago I was doing some maintenance to a customer PC (Debian+Firefox just like all my machines) and noticed how slow the Gmail web interface had become. Switching to the "old" mode helped somewhat to restore some speed, but being used to snappy dedicated mail client it still was truly slow to operate. Unfortunately today every non tech savy user thinks the browser is the internet to the point some don't even know what the word browser mean, which makes even more difficult to convince them to try anything else. Where a browser struggles with two pages of mails, I can keep available my entire archive since about 2001 on the Claws Mail client, that's over 50K mails in a dozen accounts, and query them to find whatever I need.