17 ms·

Several times over the past five years I've tried to switch from Chrome to Firefox and found it to be too slow once all add-ons were included. For a few months

Several times over the past five years I've tried to switch from Chrome to Firefox and found it to be too slow once all add-ons were included. For a few months I've been using Firefox full-time and I'm finally switched for good. I encourage others to give it a shot.

data_ders 6y ago
Same! Containers and Pop-Out video are the killer features too IMHO
- MrOxiMoron 6y ago
  yeah, as long are containers aren't synced and available on android it's not really an option for me, it's nice I can isolate certain sites, but if it doesn't work everywhere it's a bit pointless for me.
  - SECProto 6y ago
    So having containers and pop out video available nowhere is preferable to them being available on desktop but not mobile?
  - sp332 6y ago
    Progress on Containers is visible here: https://github.com/orgs/mozilla-mobile/projects/51#card-44872316 https://github.com/orgs/mozilla-mobile/projects/51#card-4487...
- __soter__ 6y ago
  I just used the pop-out video feature for the first time, after thinking it was going to be useless. It is really awesome and the ability to put the video anywhere, not just in the browser, was one of the first things in a while that made me say wow to a new feature in a web browser.
  - subliminalpanda 6y ago
    I love using it as I WFH and use an RDP session to my work computer, open PIP on my local machine and have it hover over my RDP session. Very nice!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ColanR 6y ago
  Containers are awesome. Still waiting, though, for when I can set bookmarks to use a specific container. I have a few different gmail accounts and it would make accessing them a lot easier (having containers at all is already a huge improvement).
  - Xylakant 6y ago
    I use pinned tabs for a similar use case (o365). Open the page in the container you want, right -click -> pin tab and it will remain on the left of the tab bar with just the icon remaining.
    - ColanR 6y ago
      Yup, that's exactly what I do right now as well.
  - lcnmrn 6y ago
    Click ••• > Always open this in a Container > Pick one. Done.
    - ColanR 6y ago
      As I mentioned, it's for multiple different gmail accounts. Same url, different containers.
      - Xylakant 6y ago
        you might be able to trick around that if you can set up something that redirects. I have multiple bookmarks that go via the same URL via a redirect (it's an SSO login flow), but if I set the initial URL to be tied to a specific container, the entire flow remains in that container. So if you could set gmail.example.org to to redirect to gmail and gmail2.example.org as well, you could tie those urls to a container and use bookmarks. It's a bit roundabout, but it probably works.
bishalb 6y ago
No still laggy for me, I only use it for some alternate accounts. Just feels jittery compared to chrome specially when you are using the element inspector.
- Emanation 6y ago
  Same. Firefox gets bogged down debugging one of our more complex websites. Was quite surprised when chrome didn't. Figured all the speghetti meant it was doomed either way.
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    Yeah, I've found that Firefox is fine (even better than Chrome) on simple websites. But it gets bogged down on complex sites like Facebook or Gmail.
    - nix0n 6y ago
      Firefox gets bogged down in Gmail by some sort of tracking pixel or something, and it's noticeably improved by content blocking.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  I have the complete opposite experience. Firefox runs smoothly even when I have 150+ tabs open in 4-5 windows. Meanwhile running 20+ tabs in Chromium bogs down my system so hard that the mouse can start lagging. To be fair it runs very nicely when not excessively tabbing everything, but that's just how I prefer to use the web.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  still laggy for me too but the lag factor is now lower than the google-annoys-me factor
MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
I'd consider that if it wasn't slowly eating all the available RAM on macOS.
- acdha 6y ago
  It doesn’t. Disable your extensions and re-enable them one by one until you find the one which is leaking.
  - kmarc 6y ago
    or check about:memory and about:performance
- Tagbert 6y ago
  I find that that is usually due to certain sites that use massive amounts of poorly written scripts. You can see it in the Firefox memory report. The new Facebook UI is a good example. If you kill that content process it will free the memory and reload the page.
rplnt 6y ago
I'm using it, but I need to restart it several times a week because it stops playing video. For comparison, I only restart Opera/Chrome for updates once in a few weeks. And I still hate the "many tab handling" in ff where it makes me scroll.
- Tagbert 6y ago
  There is the “⌵” icon on the right side of the tabs that pulls down a list of open tabs. I find this more useful than the ever shrinking tabs on Chrome. I have a hard time find a tab in Chrome once the number of tabs gets large.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  Compared to Chrome where you just get a row of indistinguishable minute tabs with no visible text? You can configure the min/max tab width in Firefox's preferences to control when it will start scrolling.
  - rplnt 6y ago
    It will still start scrolling though. I'm happy with just the favicons, the one extra letter or two don't help really. Never had problem with 100+ tabs when I was using Opera. With firefox it was always a fight to set it up.
coding123 6y ago
Same here, My switch happened over the weekend. Still looking for a convenient way to have profiles that are like chromes user button, but overall I'm happy to escape Google's grip.
- pricechild 6y ago
  I'm assuming you've seen https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-account... ? It doesn't work in exactly the same way - you don't by default get a different window per-profile. Instead, tabs get a different colour for each.
  - cpeterso 6y ago
    That Multi-Account Containers extension is awesome. My primary use case for Firefox container tabs is that I have separate Google accounts for personal and work stuff. With Multi-Account Containers, I can have Gmail and YouTube in Personal tabs and Google Calendar and Docs in Work tabs. You can also use Firefox's about:profiles page can to open and manage different profiles in different windows in one running instance of Firefox.
  - db579 6y ago
    One of the benefits of Chrome's user profiles this misses is the ability to have separate bookmarks for different profiles (Personal & Work for example)
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    This is the killer feature I can never drop now that I've started using it.
  - coding123 6y ago
    No, I hadn't - thank you (bow). Chrome is now buried in the backyard. (That's legal right?)
madamelic 6y ago
Firefox is unusable on Ubuntu. They have a years old bug they can't / won't fix that causes stock Firefox to be at 100% CPU constantly, regardless of what you are running. I finally switched to Brave and amazingly, it manages to run basic websites at minimal CPU. And it isn't like I am running some rinky-dink computer. I have 32GB of RAM and a Ryzen 9 3900x. EDIT: Single tab of the front page of reddit, no add-ons, nothing loading, Firefox goes between 7% and 21% CPU. Meanwhile I have 20 tabs open in Brave and it is sipping between 0.7% - 3%.
- kgwxd 6y ago
  Is it something specific to Ubuntu? I use it on Xubuntu all day, every day, and never see it spike or have problems of any kind. I have a potato.
  - madamelic 6y ago
    After looking more, after being prompted for the bug, it may be an issue with Firefox getting stuck in a loop trying to load fonts. I may work on fixing this locally, but I may just stick with Brave since it works just fine. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495900 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495900
- jedi_stannis 6y ago
  I use Firefox on Ubuntu and do not have this issue - is there something more specific that triggers this behavior? Have a link to the bug tracker?
  - madamelic 6y ago
    No clue to be honest, I just opened it on a single tab of Reddit and it was using high single to double digits of CPU sitting there. I looked at the bug again with fresh eyes and it seems like there is a deeper issue that may be my fault. I am running i3-wm and it seems like Firefox gets stuck in a loop if you don't have all the fonts it expects. I had a previous issue where I was crashing my terminal when a program tried to show emojis, which was a legitimately a fun issue to figure out. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495900 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495900 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1499385 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1499385 (not sure if this was the one I saw before giving up + installing Brave, but the fact there are _tons_ of "Firefox hitting 100% cpu" is telling)
TonyTrapp 6y ago
When a comment like this pop up, I launch this Chromium instance I have installed but never used, and it takes several seconds to launch (from an SSD, so that's no the limiting factor), while Firefox opens almost instantly. I think some operating systems (at least Windows) pre-cache frequently used applications and their data so that they start as quickly as possible. Maybe that's what you notice everytime you try to switch?
- dcminter 6y ago
  I bet you're right. For me on Linux with Firefox as my main driver: Chromium startup to empty page: 7 seconds. Firefox startup to page populated with tabs: 3 seconds. It's worse though - since I don't often reboot and I have Firefox running almost all the time the effective start up time for Firefox for me might as well be zero. Perhaps oddly, I've never perceived Firefox as slow - but I'd be the first to admit that I use it only for rather mundane purposes, so maybe there are use cases where it would be deficient.
- gtf21 6y ago
  I find this too, both on Linux and MacOS Chrome takes longer to load, longer to load pages, and eats huge amounts of CPU and RAM. By contrast (again, my experience), Firefox opens instantly for me and loads pages very fast even with about five addons installed.
- broknbottle 6y ago
  If this is on Linux, you probably have the snap or flatpak version of chromium installed.
josefresco 6y ago
Every day for the last 10+ years I've run both Firefox and Chrome on each of my screens. I have no idea what you're talking about in regards to a speed difference. The only reason I use Chrome is because it's the the new IE and I need to see and experience what my clients are.
- Yeroc 6y ago
  You've got that right. We're quickly heading back to the days of "This website best experienced in IE6." (replace IE6 with Google Chrome). It's not a good thing.
JoshTriplett 6y ago
> found it to be too slow once all add-ons were included That sounds like it's likely to be a performance issue within one or more of the add-ons. Which add-ons are you using? There may be better alternatives that don't cause performance issues. If Firefox is fast enough for you now with your add-ons, it would be even faster with a more optimal set of add-ons.
- junon 6y ago
  It certainly wasn't add-ons. Firefox has a long history of performance issues. EDIT: I see the firefox brigade is out in full force.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    The comment I was responding to specifically said "found it to be too slow once all add-ons were included", so I don't think it's at all unreasonable to talk about the add-ons. That doesn't mean I'm dismissing the possibility that Firefox itself had a performance issue as well.
- nyx_ 6y ago
  "The software doesn't perform well with your use case, huh? Have you tried getting a different use case?" :)
  - labawi 6y ago
    CPU doesn't execute <program> fast enough. Have you tried a different <program>?
tchalla 6y ago
It would help if you post the details of the machine you are performing the switch.
cpeterso 6y ago
> For a few months I've been using Firefox full-time and I'm finally switched for good. What was different for you that made switching permanently to Firefox acceptable this time?
vintagedave 6y ago
> For a few months I've been using Firefox full-time and I'm finally switched for good. I encourage others to give it a shot. I agree. I tried to switch several times since 2016. A couple of months ago, Firefox finally performed well enough I could do it. I'm the type of person who has five windows open with twenty tabs each, and it handles that now. I also added Container Tabs Sidebar, DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, Firefox Multi-Account Containers (this thing is amazing for keeping sites separate!), and uBlock Origin. I like it now more than Chrome.
- nextos 6y ago
  For me the killer addon is Temporary Containers. It creates and destroys containers for each domain or subdomain, but you can include exceptions.
- jholman 6y ago
  I've been keeping ten to twenty windows open, with 100-800 tabs total, in Firefox, since before Chrome existed. Chrome never has even come close to being able to handle that. I am so baffled by stories like yours.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Jnr 6y ago
    Same here. I use Firefox with Tree Style Tabs extension with lots of open tabs. I could never manage that in Chrome. Ever since the Quantum updates Firefox has become faster but it wasn't very slow to begin with. Maybe it was a bit slower on some netbooks bit it hasn't been an issue on my PC.
  - smsm42 6y ago
    Workona + The Great Suspender make it manageable for me (72 tabs open currently, probably peaking over 100 in an average workday).
Daniel_sk 6y ago
Switched a year go, no issues, never going back to Chrome.
cdnsteve 6y ago
Same here, with my recent OS install I've gone Full Fox and loving it.
rvba 6y ago
Because Firefox disabled all add-ons and only 7 work.
- scotu 6y ago
  I think you are talking about firefox for android? I have 19 active right now on firefox for macos

data_ders 6y ago

Same! Containers and Pop-Out video are the killer features too IMHO

MrOxiMoron 6y ago
yeah, as long are containers aren't synced and available on android it's not really an option for me, it's nice I can isolate certain sites, but if it doesn't work everywhere it's a bit pointless for me.
- SECProto 6y ago
  So having containers and pop out video available nowhere is preferable to them being available on desktop but not mobile?
- sp332 6y ago
  Progress on Containers is visible here: https://github.com/orgs/mozilla-mobile/projects/51#card-44872316 https://github.com/orgs/mozilla-mobile/projects/51#card-4487...
__soter__ 6y ago
I just used the pop-out video feature for the first time, after thinking it was going to be useless. It is really awesome and the ability to put the video anywhere, not just in the browser, was one of the first things in a while that made me say wow to a new feature in a web browser.
- subliminalpanda 6y ago
  I love using it as I WFH and use an RDP session to my work computer, open PIP on my local machine and have it hover over my RDP session. Very nice!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ColanR 6y ago
Containers are awesome. Still waiting, though, for when I can set bookmarks to use a specific container. I have a few different gmail accounts and it would make accessing them a lot easier (having containers at all is already a huge improvement).
- Xylakant 6y ago
  I use pinned tabs for a similar use case (o365). Open the page in the container you want, right -click -> pin tab and it will remain on the left of the tab bar with just the icon remaining.
  - ColanR 6y ago
    Yup, that's exactly what I do right now as well.
- lcnmrn 6y ago
  Click ••• > Always open this in a Container > Pick one. Done.
  - ColanR 6y ago
    As I mentioned, it's for multiple different gmail accounts. Same url, different containers.
    - Xylakant 6y ago
      you might be able to trick around that if you can set up something that redirects. I have multiple bookmarks that go via the same URL via a redirect (it's an SSO login flow), but if I set the initial URL to be tied to a specific container, the entire flow remains in that container. So if you could set gmail.example.org to to redirect to gmail and gmail2.example.org as well, you could tie those urls to a container and use bookmarks. It's a bit roundabout, but it probably works.

bishalb 6y ago

No still laggy for me, I only use it for some alternate accounts. Just feels jittery compared to chrome specially when you are using the element inspector.

Emanation 6y ago
Same. Firefox gets bogged down debugging one of our more complex websites. Was quite surprised when chrome didn't. Figured all the speghetti meant it was doomed either way.
- nicoburns 6y ago
  Yeah, I've found that Firefox is fine (even better than Chrome) on simple websites. But it gets bogged down on complex sites like Facebook or Gmail.
  - nix0n 6y ago
    Firefox gets bogged down in Gmail by some sort of tracking pixel or something, and it's noticeably improved by content blocking.
alpaca128 6y ago
I have the complete opposite experience. Firefox runs smoothly even when I have 150+ tabs open in 4-5 windows. Meanwhile running 20+ tabs in Chromium bogs down my system so hard that the mouse can start lagging. To be fair it runs very nicely when not excessively tabbing everything, but that's just how I prefer to use the web.
agumonkey 6y ago
still laggy for me too but the lag factor is now lower than the google-annoys-me factor

MrBuddyCasino 6y ago

I'd consider that if it wasn't slowly eating all the available RAM on macOS.

acdha 6y ago
It doesn’t. Disable your extensions and re-enable them one by one until you find the one which is leaking.
- kmarc 6y ago
  or check about:memory and about:performance
Tagbert 6y ago
I find that that is usually due to certain sites that use massive amounts of poorly written scripts. You can see it in the Firefox memory report. The new Facebook UI is a good example. If you kill that content process it will free the memory and reload the page.

rplnt 6y ago

I'm using it, but I need to restart it several times a week because it stops playing video. For comparison, I only restart Opera/Chrome for updates once in a few weeks. And I still hate the "many tab handling" in ff where it makes me scroll.

Tagbert 6y ago
There is the “⌵” icon on the right side of the tabs that pulls down a list of open tabs. I find this more useful than the ever shrinking tabs on Chrome. I have a hard time find a tab in Chrome once the number of tabs gets large.
ubercow13 6y ago
Compared to Chrome where you just get a row of indistinguishable minute tabs with no visible text? You can configure the min/max tab width in Firefox's preferences to control when it will start scrolling.
- rplnt 6y ago
  It will still start scrolling though. I'm happy with just the favicons, the one extra letter or two don't help really. Never had problem with 100+ tabs when I was using Opera. With firefox it was always a fight to set it up.

coding123 6y ago

Same here, My switch happened over the weekend. Still looking for a convenient way to have profiles that are like chromes user button, but overall I'm happy to escape Google's grip.

pricechild 6y ago
I'm assuming you've seen https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-account... ? It doesn't work in exactly the same way - you don't by default get a different window per-profile. Instead, tabs get a different colour for each.
- cpeterso 6y ago
  That Multi-Account Containers extension is awesome. My primary use case for Firefox container tabs is that I have separate Google accounts for personal and work stuff. With Multi-Account Containers, I can have Gmail and YouTube in Personal tabs and Google Calendar and Docs in Work tabs. You can also use Firefox's about:profiles page can to open and manage different profiles in different windows in one running instance of Firefox.
- db579 6y ago
  One of the benefits of Chrome's user profiles this misses is the ability to have separate bookmarks for different profiles (Personal & Work for example)
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  This is the killer feature I can never drop now that I've started using it.
- coding123 6y ago
  No, I hadn't - thank you (bow). Chrome is now buried in the backyard. (That's legal right?)

madamelic 6y ago

Firefox is unusable on Ubuntu. They have a years old bug they can't / won't fix that causes stock Firefox to be at 100% CPU constantly, regardless of what you are running. I finally switched to Brave and amazingly, it manages to run basic websites at minimal CPU. And it isn't like I am running some rinky-dink computer. I have 32GB of RAM and a Ryzen 9 3900x. EDIT: Single tab of the front page of reddit, no add-ons, nothing loading, Firefox goes between 7% and 21% CPU. Meanwhile I have 20 tabs open in Brave and it is sipping between 0.7% - 3%.

kgwxd 6y ago
Is it something specific to Ubuntu? I use it on Xubuntu all day, every day, and never see it spike or have problems of any kind. I have a potato.
- madamelic 6y ago
  After looking more, after being prompted for the bug, it may be an issue with Firefox getting stuck in a loop trying to load fonts. I may work on fixing this locally, but I may just stick with Brave since it works just fine. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495900 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495900
jedi_stannis 6y ago
I use Firefox on Ubuntu and do not have this issue - is there something more specific that triggers this behavior? Have a link to the bug tracker?
- madamelic 6y ago
  No clue to be honest, I just opened it on a single tab of Reddit and it was using high single to double digits of CPU sitting there. I looked at the bug again with fresh eyes and it seems like there is a deeper issue that may be my fault. I am running i3-wm and it seems like Firefox gets stuck in a loop if you don't have all the fonts it expects. I had a previous issue where I was crashing my terminal when a program tried to show emojis, which was a legitimately a fun issue to figure out. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495900 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495900 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1499385 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1499385 (not sure if this was the one I saw before giving up + installing Brave, but the fact there are _tons_ of "Firefox hitting 100% cpu" is telling)

TonyTrapp 6y ago

When a comment like this pop up, I launch this Chromium instance I have installed but never used, and it takes several seconds to launch (from an SSD, so that's no the limiting factor), while Firefox opens almost instantly. I think some operating systems (at least Windows) pre-cache frequently used applications and their data so that they start as quickly as possible. Maybe that's what you notice everytime you try to switch?

dcminter 6y ago
I bet you're right. For me on Linux with Firefox as my main driver: Chromium startup to empty page: 7 seconds. Firefox startup to page populated with tabs: 3 seconds. It's worse though - since I don't often reboot and I have Firefox running almost all the time the effective start up time for Firefox for me might as well be zero. Perhaps oddly, I've never perceived Firefox as slow - but I'd be the first to admit that I use it only for rather mundane purposes, so maybe there are use cases where it would be deficient.
gtf21 6y ago
I find this too, both on Linux and MacOS Chrome takes longer to load, longer to load pages, and eats huge amounts of CPU and RAM. By contrast (again, my experience), Firefox opens instantly for me and loads pages very fast even with about five addons installed.
broknbottle 6y ago
If this is on Linux, you probably have the snap or flatpak version of chromium installed.

josefresco 6y ago

Every day for the last 10+ years I've run both Firefox and Chrome on each of my screens. I have no idea what you're talking about in regards to a speed difference. The only reason I use Chrome is because it's the the new IE and I need to see and experience what my clients are.

Yeroc 6y ago
You've got that right. We're quickly heading back to the days of "This website best experienced in IE6." (replace IE6 with Google Chrome). It's not a good thing.

JoshTriplett 6y ago

> found it to be too slow once all add-ons were included That sounds like it's likely to be a performance issue within one or more of the add-ons. Which add-ons are you using? There may be better alternatives that don't cause performance issues. If Firefox is fast enough for you now with your add-ons, it would be even faster with a more optimal set of add-ons.

junon 6y ago
It certainly wasn't add-ons. Firefox has a long history of performance issues. EDIT: I see the firefox brigade is out in full force.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  The comment I was responding to specifically said "found it to be too slow once all add-ons were included", so I don't think it's at all unreasonable to talk about the add-ons. That doesn't mean I'm dismissing the possibility that Firefox itself had a performance issue as well.
nyx_ 6y ago
"The software doesn't perform well with your use case, huh? Have you tried getting a different use case?" :)
- labawi 6y ago
  CPU doesn't execute <program> fast enough. Have you tried a different <program>?

tchalla 6y ago

It would help if you post the details of the machine you are performing the switch.

cpeterso 6y ago

> For a few months I've been using Firefox full-time and I'm finally switched for good. What was different for you that made switching permanently to Firefox acceptable this time?

vintagedave 6y ago

> For a few months I've been using Firefox full-time and I'm finally switched for good. I encourage others to give it a shot. I agree. I tried to switch several times since 2016. A couple of months ago, Firefox finally performed well enough I could do it. I'm the type of person who has five windows open with twenty tabs each, and it handles that now. I also added Container Tabs Sidebar, DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, Firefox Multi-Account Containers (this thing is amazing for keeping sites separate!), and uBlock Origin. I like it now more than Chrome.

nextos 6y ago
For me the killer addon is Temporary Containers. It creates and destroys containers for each domain or subdomain, but you can include exceptions.
jholman 6y ago
I've been keeping ten to twenty windows open, with 100-800 tabs total, in Firefox, since before Chrome existed. Chrome never has even come close to being able to handle that. I am so baffled by stories like yours.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Jnr 6y ago
  Same here. I use Firefox with Tree Style Tabs extension with lots of open tabs. I could never manage that in Chrome. Ever since the Quantum updates Firefox has become faster but it wasn't very slow to begin with. Maybe it was a bit slower on some netbooks bit it hasn't been an issue on my PC.
- smsm42 6y ago
  Workona + The Great Suspender make it manageable for me (72 tabs open currently, probably peaking over 100 in an average workday).

Daniel_sk 6y ago

Switched a year go, no issues, never going back to Chrome.

cdnsteve 6y ago

Same here, with my recent OS install I've gone Full Fox and loving it.

rvba 6y ago

Because Firefox disabled all add-ons and only 7 work.

scotu 6y ago
I think you are talking about firefox for android? I have 19 active right now on firefox for macos