Yeah, the browser has gotten snappier. But then I pop open the dev tools and they're unbearably slow - like I simply can't do real dev work in FF anymore, have to use Chrome. It may be that I tend to do a lot of development with Web Components, which FF still doesn't have natively (though Custom Elements are live in 59/nightly, right?!), but either way it seems like a failing of the tooling that it beachballs for 5-10s at a time when inspecting normal valid html.

This is strange. FF dev tools are a lot quicker for our apps then the Chrome dev tools. In fact, the Chrome dev tools are snail speed compared to the FF ones. Again, this might be related to the type of app you are developing.

Try this: From the "Inspector" tab, click on any CSS file in order to open the Style Editor. Loading the file and then scrolling to the relevant part is much slower than Chrome if you do this on a page with several stylesheets.

Yep, true that.

The browser itself is very snappy an enjoyable now (apart from high res videos, which drive up CPU load a lot).

But the devtools are unbearably slow. They hog down performance to a crawl.

I use FF as my main browser now, but when I need to do some web debugging I switch over to chrome.

Have you tried the developer edition? https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/

The "break on exception" button is missing in that one.

> But then I pop open the dev tools and they're unbearably slow - like I simply can't do real dev work in FF anymore, have to use Chrome.

+1

I've had to sit patiently waiting for sourcemaps to load or finally hit breakpoints in FF, I usually try to test changes in Chrome and hope that they work well in FF. Minor inspector usage for CSS styling and what not.

(It's still my primary browser at work, though.)

I experienced the same trying to switch recently. The devtools are the only blocker from me switching to firefox - they're much worse than they used to be performance-wise

same here. Am considering switching over to firefox for main browsing, but development is def in chrome for now. Last time I checked FF console warnings still brought me to the compiled JS file instead of the actual source file through sourcemaps. Did that change yet? (very limited internet atm so cant check)

This! If I have at least one tab with Dev Tools open, then FF becomes unbearably slow. Will check if it is fixed in FF58 though.

When FF 57 came out I was surprised at the new debugger, much better than the old one. But turns out it's still useless. I can't put a breakpoint in the middle of a WebGL game and expect it to work like in Chrome.

The last dev version is even more useless, the "break on exception" button is missing.

Likewise, but I've found the performance on a few key websites to be awful. Namely Facebook, and often Google Inbox.

Another consequence of switching has been difficulty in using things like my Apple TV or Chromecast (e.g. casting a video to my TV), or using my Mac's media keys to control Google Play Music.

Google inbox is terrible on ff, this is vendor lock-in by google, the new MS

Google Inbox is also pretty terrible on chrome for me, i'm not sure i'd blame vendor lock-in.

I went from GMail -> Inbox -> GMail -> Thunderbird

Not really, it works fine on Safari.

Which shared a lot of roots with Chrome. It's probably that they are optimizing for things that are fast in Chrome's JavaScript engine, which isn't necessarily what's fast in Firefox's Javascript engine.

Safari's JS engine is different than Chrome's though, no?

Yes, although I'm not sure (and can't find god info on) whether they started from a similar lineage, or even if they just happen to just share some similarities that Mozilla's doesn't. If SquirrelFish (which became Nitro) happened to start with a similar architectural base, that could predispose them to make similar choices over time (e.g. if arrays are extremely efficient because the underlying types are well implemented, that could have survived and influenced later decisions. Array performance regressions might be seen as bugs that stop progress, and would possible cut of possible avenues of advancement).

There's a decade of history in these engines with a lot of man hours put into them, and they were actively competing with each other very loudly for a while. There's little you could tell me I couldn't find some possible narrative justification for if I consider the PR, bureaucracy, talent and design decisions that might stem from those over a decade.

V8 and JavaScriptCore were written entirely independently; there was little influence between the two. V8 started as an empty codebase, not a fork of JSC.

Any proof of that claim? (that it is intentional from google and not just a ff issue?)

Google didn't even make Inbox available on Firefox for months because they didn't care, and when they did, they ended up serving entirely different HTML and JS to FF.

This is the same Google that is still keeping Allo Web and Google Earth a Chrome exclusive, the same one that has paid adware vendors to sneakily install Chrome, etc.

Sure, you can believe that this is jist a coincidence. But that's one unlucky streak of coincidences. In fact, you'd be more likely to win the Powerball ten times in a row than for all this to happen by coincidence.

Allo web has been available on browsers other than Chrome for a while - http://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/03/allo-web-adds-suppor...

This gives a good reason why Google Earth is only on Chrome - https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/66ao68/new_version_o...

Disclaimer: I work at Google but not any of the related teams. I was curious myself about these so I Googled and came across the above two articles so these opinions are of my own.

Any chance you could poke the Hangouts team to get that working in Firefox? At this point they’ve have 28 months public notice that Mozilla would be deprecating NPAPI.

Hangouts works in Firefox Nightly now.

Oh! Great news, it didn’t when I last tested a couple of weeks ago so I’d assumed there was no progress.

Agree: I have similar performance issues with Google Inbox. E.g. I'm unable to attach files sometimes, and the interface is terrible. Still, I've switched to the new FF as my browser of choice and with the exception of those few sites it's great

It was never that slow as some people declare it to be.

Yeah, it positively was, and it would lock the browser up with misbehaving tabs. I managed to use Fx50 (or so, I forget the exact release) for about a day before going "nope, back to Chrome, it might chew batteries like crazy but at least it's fast."

Firefox has significantly improved and deserves praise for it. Rewriting history to always be at war with Eastchromea is unnecessary.

I have had the opposite experience. While individual page loads were a bit quicker in Chrome after a number of tabs were open it bogged down so badly (coupled with the lack of customization) I ran back to Firefox every time. A few months later I would try again with similar results.

I agree that when a tab would crash FF would die in spectacular ways but this was perhaps a once a month experience? Tab restore brought everything back each time. As a result I usually only opened Chrome for site testing.

This. I tried Chrome two or three times for several months a few years ago. Yes, it was fast but had issues with loading pages I usually used, e.g. I click on a link and shows me white page for some time, long enough to be annoying. On the other hand FF since pre 1.x versions is always about the same. I don't see big improvements in speed and I don't see big degradation too. The only problem I had is with Atlassian web pages that tend to memory leak when left open for days. At home where I never open them FF is very stable.

This seems to be a weird thing:

I've been om FF the while time and I'm impatient.

In the other hand I've no reason not to believe it when so many people report performance issues.

My best guess is a combination of different browsing habits and/or different hardware/os.

(My browsing habits are mostly hn, local news and pages I work on and I've had decent hardware running various versions of Linux and Windows.)

I've found some stuff to be a bit slower on new FF since I made the switch when Quantum came out, but I chalk that up to heavy use of some Google webapps in which the chrome optimizations might have the opposite effect on a different JavaScript engine, and heavy use of containers, which are awesome.[1]

1: At first I didn't know how to get sites to default to a container, so kept having to close and reopen tabs to get the right contianer, but once I figured that out, it's smooth.

I too experience surprisingly bad performance with google webapps in Firefox.

I've had FF become extremely slow on two machines while it worked fine everywhere else. After a few months, back to normal. Profile refreshes etc didn't seem to make any difference and I still have no idea why it happens.

"It doesn't work on my machine" is a new one.

The benchmarks have always been respectable. I'm sure there are some configurations that made it work poorly, and that's a problem. That isn't true in general.

Benchmarks aren't user experience and never have been. It doesn't matter how fast you render if you feel slow. And, for me, Firefox has felt slow on any hardware I've tried it on for more of its existence than it has not. And it is the only browser I have used in the last decade that hard-locked when a tab got crunchy.

The person above said "slow," you assume they meant artificial JavaScript benchmarks but I'm pretty sure that wasn't the intent.

I too found Firefox pre-57 slow and switched to Chrome. That was because the user experience was slow, slow to open, slow in UI responsiveness, slow to make websites actually usable. Everything had this UI lag feel.

I'm sure it benchmarked fine, but I am a human, not a JavaScript benchmark.

That's a fair point. I've always found Firefox pretty speedy, but I can't judge other people's experiences and I don't think it's possible to objectively measure subjective user experience. Every piece of software has people who have unusually bad experiences and I don't know how to judge which are reliable and representative. The best you could do is polls, which are not reliable.

I don't know how to tell the difference between "Firefox is slow" and "Firefox has an undeserved reputation for being slow."

I don't really know.

I just installed Chrome besides Firefox back in the days and it was much snappier. This became my new baseline.

It was for me. On both Win10 and Ubuntu. Fx 57 was a game changer.

I wonder how Firefox compares to Edge on a tablet like a Surface Pro. I really like the gestures and general touch and touchpad support in Edge and Edge should be quite efficient on battery life as long as you stay away from monsters like Facebook.

I have Firefox, Chrome and Edge on my Surface Pro 4. I prefer using Edge there because it's touch gestures seem to work better.

Firefox works just fine, but I feel it is more difficult than it should be to hit the tab close buttons with my finger.

« Besides videos » is a great problem imho. The video player is complete garbage. Everytime my video is starting to stutter, i go to chrome to see if it’s a network issue, and so far 100% of the time chrome played it just fine.

I also switched back to firefox a few weeks ago and I'm not impressed.

* Performance is really not that good. I especially have issue on Google sites (Docs and Drive).

* Scroll-wheel to switch between tabs is gone.

* No multi-tab management (shift/ctrl+click to select and move multiple tabs) like Chrome has

* Firefox's UI on Android is utter garbage, so I haven't been able to switch there which defeats the point of having browser sync. [it leaves zero space for the url bar, all taken by useless buttons which Chrome cleverly hides under the menu button]

> I especially have issue on Google sites (Docs and Drive)

And YouTube. And Search. Hangouts, Gmail, Maps, Calendar, Groups, everything else? I don't buy it for a second that it isn't on purpose, even with the polyfill justification.

You only make it easier for people like me to continue ignoring Chrome (if I even needed more reasons).

I don’t think Google is trying to slow it down or does any work to hamper FF or Safari or IE.

I just don’t think they care. If it works, more or less, ship it.

Not lightning fast in Chrome? Put a couple of engineers on it.

Welcome back to 1998 and ‘Best Viewed With’ badges.

Let's hope they don't decide to serve Firefox users JSON output and call it a day

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7oxiae/i_had_to_us...

> Scroll-wheel to switch between tabs is gone.

But I can scroll through list of clickable and readable tabs if they don't fit the screen all at once, unlike in Chrome where you get lots of unusable hair-thin controls instead.

What's wrong with the Firefox on Android? Recent version is minimalistic in terms of design, while works the same way as desktop FF in terms of UX. I've never had any issues, plus "Firefox Sync", "Send Tab to Device..." and Pocket Reader integration—are really great features.

As for desktop version, multiselect/moving tabs is convenient on Chrome, but vertical tabs/bookmarks/history/synced devices available in Firefox is much, much better.

And not to forget the most important feature: you can install uBlock Origin

I had no idea you could select multiple tabs in Chrome. That's awesome--thank you!!

Does anyone else get videos that show as like a pink or green screen and can still hear audio? I've experienced this on multiple machines with both Linux and Windows.

Edit: Experienced this under FF57, unknown under 58 because I just updated it.

This also usually happens with things like Facebook videos, but would less often happen with Youtube.

We've seen this on select AMD (https://bugzil.la/1417442) and Nvidia (https://bugzil.la/1422850) video cards. What GPU and driver version are you running?

I am using Intel, but Nvidia. On my current machine (Windows) I have a GeForce GTS 450 and the driver version is 23.21.13.8813. The linux one is Arch and has a 1060 Max Q, but I'm not at that computer and don't know the driver. Maybe selection bias, but I think it happens much less on the linux computer.

Too late to make an edit, but I am still experiencing the issue on the Windows version and FF58

https://screenshots.firefox.com/5GyCe8xjvqM7XVYj/www.faceboo...

Doh! Missed your followup. Looks like the exact same card and driver version are mentioned in Bug 1422850 (https://bugzil.la/1422850), and that disabling hardware acceleration should temporarily fix it.

I'd suggest signing into Bugzilla and following that bug so you get email updates when it changes status.

Hey @godelski, I had that issue in Firefox 57, but it seemed to have gone away with 58. Just FYI - I tried altering a bunch of `about:config` non-default settings, but none of them helped. Thanks.

Thanks for the reply. I edited my comment to note that I was experiencing this under 57. I don't know if it will continue under 58 because it seemed more like a random issue, but it is good to know I'm not the only one.

I guess this is bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1417442 ? If so that looks like it’ll be fixed in 59.