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.