Also, FireFox for Android runs faster that Chrome (not because FireFox is faster that Chrome on Android, but because the ad-blocker does a nice work avoiding to load garbage), and the RAM usage it's keep at bay. I have like ten tabs on FF for Android and keeps working like if I had one open.
On any case, on Chrome and Firefox you can install a add-on called "Tab suspender". It allows to save ram, literally suspending tabs that has not been accesses on some time. Try it.
*edit : grammar
Reflects my experience. I use Firefox at work, Chrome at home. Chrome RAM usage is much higher than FF. Not that I really mind - I have more than enough RAM to support it. But it often leaves me wondering if some tab/plugin/extension is misbehaving, which in turn forces me to close all my tabs only to find that the memory use stays high and the number of Chrome processes doesn't decrease as expected. I'm considering switching back to Firefox at home now.
EDIT: OK, tested with Firefox now. Number of process doesn't decrease as I close tabs either, but memory use is still considerably higher than Chrome.
Entering about:about in the URL bar gives you a short list of interesting about:* links that you can play around.
I guess it depends per device and use-case. I use Firefox everywhere. Home (PC with Linux OS), work (laptop with Linux OS) and on my phone.
On my pc I have 0 RAM or CPU issues with Firefox. (intel i5, and nvidia GTS 250, ancient I know.)
On my laptop (intel i7 and nvidia NVS 5200M) I have had serious CPU issues though. With version 57 it used to stay above 90% CPU for hours. Since version 58 though it's been a lot better. Sometimes stays at about 40% for a while, then goes back down to like 10%. I suspect it might be due to some of the tabs I have open with zabbix graphs, but I don't know for certain.
I love using firefox on my phone because it's the only mobile browser that can use uBlock Origin. I don't care how fast or smooth chrome is on mobile, I'm not gonna use it if the price you have to pay is being eye-raped by ads.
and its got smooth scrolling. (at least on android)
* https://github.com/brave/browser-android-tabs
I want to do that but can't replace chrome's debugging features, specifically websocket network call analysis and hover variable to get its value. How have you replaced these feature in your workflow?
1. Record a profile with the Gecko Profiler WebExtension (Install it from https://perf-html.io/)
2. Upload the profile to https://perf-html.io/
3. Create a bug on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ with a link to this performance profile.
The Firefox developers are friendly and welcome, and I'd say in about 50-75% of cases the bugs get fixed in a timely manner.
It might also be that being the second fastest guy on the track will not win you a gold medal. As everyone tends to develop and test software on Blink/V8, it will undoubtedly feel slow when ran on a competiting browser.
If it being slow really is a rule rather than an exception, then perhaps there is something in your configuration making it that way. Or a specific website that you happen to always have open. It's not normally always slow for most people, so again, this would be useful to know about.
It's true that often developers only test on Chrome, and in making sure it runs smoothly there they happen to make something that performs badly on Firefox. If we know about these websites then we can see if it's something we should change on our end, or get in touch with the developers ourselves.
How about making this, Record, Profile, and Submission procedure built in. Button Accessible within 3-4 clicks. The amount of work required to get all these done and submitted is not easy especially for average users. I do a lot in my most enthusiastic days ( Mostly for Memshrink ), but after Memshrink I couldn't be bother much, unless the bug is annoying enough that persist.
If the bugreport just reads "it's slow", then of course that's not helpful. However, performance issues as drastic as described above are certainly not normal. I'm using Firefox on Windows, Linux and (up until recently) macOS and never encountered anything remotely like this. So it would certainly be helpful to get detailed traces of that abnormal situation.
There can be all sorts of reasons that specific sites or specific installations might show performance problems that aren't representative of the typical experience. Your specific environment might have some feature (particular hardware, profile data, addons, etc.) that happen to trigger a bad case in some code and so lead to an overall slowdown. Or you might be regularly using a site that happens to do something that's CPU intensive in Firefox but less so in other browsers. This could be a Firefox problem (maybe we implemented a feature using an algorithm with different tradeoffs compared to other browsers and it so happens that everyone avoids the worst case behaviour in Chrome, but not in Firefox, maybe our implementation just has issues that can be fixed), or it could be a site problem (sometimes sites just send buggy, broken code to specific browsers that causes them to use lots of CPU for no reason).
One of the things that was most valuable during the Quantum project was the work to improve the profiling tools. If you can capture a profile using the super-easy-to-use gecko profiler[1] and create a bug with the profile attached it should be possible to figure out what exactly is causing the problem in your case. Without that data it's really hard to make progress because the kind of problem you experience is just not something that would be allowed to ship if it was known.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance...
It is a showstopper. I don't care about new features if it can't handle basic stability.
If it was broken for everyone it would already have been fixed.
Oh, and before anyone asks, on the thinkpad the performance issue was still present on a debian stretch install as well.
Just because it works on your system doesn't mean this isn't a bug they need to fix.
I use tree style tabs, so I have lots of tabs open - after a cleanup this morning, I still have 26, but 50 to 100 is far from unusual - and it's just as fast as ever to open new tabs. I don't notice the memory usage at all. Sure, browsers are all the biggest hogs - Chrome, Firefox, Slack - but with 16G in my work laptop there's no noticeable difference than with my home machine with 32G.
I don't use Chrome much beyond development testing, but with some features - anything with smooth animations in particular - I see way more CPU usage from it than FF.
Just to add another data point, this has also been my experience: Firefox since Quantum often pegs CPU cores at 100% when showing pages with even quite simple animations.
The other big trouble area since Quantum seems to be extensions. After various experiments of my own and various discussions online, it seems clear that the machines I use where there are more extensions involved are much less stable and much more vulnerable to problems generally than those with mostly vanilla Firefox installations.
Firefox is doing a good job about analysing extensions startup performance, but I guess they need to do the same thing for page loads and memory usage. Or integrate the extension functionality into core more.
Unfortunately in practice what's happened so far is that lots of useful little things aren't possible any more because the new API doesn't support them, while extensions are evidently still capable of causing problems with performance and stability anyway.
Hopefully both of these aspects will improve in time. In particular, the emphasis on personalisation and improving the extensions ecosystem in this roadmap is welcome and seems very much in keeping with what a lot of us used to like about Firefox. I hope they really do put their focus there and exercise caution on becoming too "opinionated".
Using Firefox at work, often with more than 100 Tabs and multiple windows open without any issues. And my machine only has 6GB RAM...
On another note, the lack of support for sessions is the real killer for me. And the lack of WebSocket debugging is a big strike against the dev in me. I use FF as my primary browser, but gotta give credit where it is due.
I suspect they don't realize how many viewers this costs them, as this has been behind a flag for months already, meanwhile RTC users are being told "We recommend Chrome".
And while we are talking about hardware, it would be nice, if both Chrome and Firefox supported hw accelerated decoding on Linux. Currently, they don't support it at all.
Are you running a lot of extensions?
but it takes up too much CPU. I kept track of the issue https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042
It seems it's just normal that every page render takes 80-90% cpu. I'll take battery life over marginal performance improvements.
Hope they'll make it a priority one day.
I had many issues with Firefox and Webex. In the end just put it down to Linux or Ghostery plugin rather than Firefox specifically, as I couldn't get it to work with Chromium either.
However, in my experience Firefox does work flawlessly with appear.in
You can see a setting "Performance" in the first tab, uncheck the "Use recommended.." and reduce the number of CPUs it suggest. Maybe that'll help?
Have you tried brave browser ? It was created by Brendan Eich, the co-founder of Mozilla and I'm so happy with Brave browser right now, especially in terms of resource consumption, it's just so slick and fast
Mild ? For some reasons, it's like 5X faster then chrome on my laptop, Can't live without it anymore
If anyone has suggestions how I could get all those things fixed it would be really welcome. I'm using an Intel Core 2 6700 with Intel 965Q graphics with 8GB of RAM.
If none of that works, you could try going back to about:support and click on Refresh Firefox. You’ll lose settings and extensions but it can clear up problematic issues. [2]
[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drive...
[2] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-a...
Please record a profile and report this.
[Edit] Why the downvotes? I want Firefox to be successful, it just seems to have lost its charm from when it was originally called Phoenix[/Edit]
Not sure about the downvotes, either, because I think you have a very good point.
However, I suspect that many people want Firefox to be exactly like Chrome, at least subconsciously. This is of course silly, because what do we win if Firefox becomes a second Chrome? Also, it would mean that Firefox will always lose, because every little difference to Chrome would be considered negative.
On the other hand, it might make tactically sense for Firefox to mimic Chrome for now, to win back the lost users.
In the end, I want Firefox to be clearly different from and better than Chrome.
In fact it's painfully obvious that Mozilla isn't at all trying to "clone" Chrome, given that their recent Photon UI design looks less like Chrome than their previous Australis UI, all things considered. Not to mention that even their own Chromium-based products are drastically differently from Chrome, and they've just confirmed in this post that they intend to even move those over to GeckoView.
As such it's a very silly and tiresome argument to hear, and since the rest of the comment didn't seem very interested in having a conversation or adding to the greater discussion, I'm not surprised it would just get downvoted.
Sorry, I'm currently switching back to Chrome. :(
I believe that should only happen for tabs restored during startup. Unlike Chrome (unless something has changed), Firefox lazy-loads restored tabs on startup. I think that's preferable to the alternative.
I've discovered also that when I switch from tab to tab, sometimes the tab needs to reload the page. That's fine. But sometimes, it takes forever to get past a blank white screen on that tab.
Went back to Firefox Quantum for a few months. Now I'm back on Chrome for exactly the same reasons. After hours of active use, Firefox is eating a ton of RAM and consuming way too much CPU, while also struggling to open any pages (let alone more complex apps) or downright crashing the apps that were already running.
Plus, it does not seem to support web calls at all (Google Meet, BlueJeans, GoToMeeting you name it).
I hate being on Chrome again, and I miss those Firefox features. But I have work to do, and I just can't have my tools grind to a halt all the time.