Firefox went through a long period of being awful performance wise, they really shot themselves in the foot as techies left them in droves because of it. And they'd often insist it'd improved when it was obvious that it was was nowhere near Chrome's level as soon as you opened the browser. I kept trying to get back to it, but every time it drove me away. Still feels laggy on desktop vs Chrome when I tried it 3 months ago. I have all the preload stuff turned off in Chrome and use DDG so it's not because of that.

I use it on my phone now as I don't support AMP at all, and it still has some weird issues compared to Chrome. The main annoyances for me are:

- Kinda hanging occasionally when you have 40 or 50 tabs open. Sometimes have to close and reopen it, sometimes it'll start being responsive again. Never had these problems in Chrome.

- Never ending loading bars. While it might be true that some script hasn't loaded, I don't need to know and it's just annoying to have a half complete blue bar at the top of the page. It adds to the perception that there's something wrong, and it feels like somethings wrong with Firefox Mobile not something's wrong with the web page.

- I want to pull down to refresh. I know it's silly but 6 months on I still do it out of muscle memory, and then remember you have to click the menu, then click the refresh. Pull down is just great, far superior to their solution.

- Thumbnails of old tabs that are still open get flushed, never happens in Chrome. What it means is that you can't scan the tabs for an old open tab you want by the look of the thumbnail. for example, I have a jambalya recipe I tried and like but haven't got round to transcribing and every two or three weeks have to hunt through the damn tabs to find it.

- Their tab solution is not as nice as Chrome's. I really don't like the layout, or find it as usable, even months on. When Chrome initially switched theirs I was sceptical, but really learned to love the concertina style.

I am also finding it quite hard to get proper ad blocking working. It's working for some sites, but no matter what I do I'm still getting google ads and now certain login pages hang completely including some google driven ones. Why is it so hard to do? I'm pretty competent with computers after all! (Yes, I've turned off things like acceptable ads and checked the whitelists).

You should try out their new version of Firefox Mobile that they've been working on. It's much faster.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fe...

Using Fedora Linux, last I tried a switch to FF (less than 6 months ago) it was way slower than chrome. I actually like FF functionality more and would prefer to use it but my laptop runs significantly hotter when I run FF on it.

Just given its Fedora I would be a bit nervous to instantly assume full blame on Firefox, given the nature of the OS, but definitely give a try again!

I don't really have any issues with Fedora performance wise, is it widely perceived to not be performant? I have had much more issues with everything on Ubuntu than I ever had with Fedora. Maybe ricing with Gentoo could get me a bit further but given both Firefox and Chrome will basically use the same system libraries I don't see how it is fair to blame Fedora for the difference.

I've been running FF on Fedora for the last 14 months with no problems. I typically have 20-40 tabs open, but then again, I'm also using NoScript so maybe 10-20 of those tabs are not doing so much damage to my performance. (The ones that stick around, like 4 Gmail tabs, Slack, RSS reader, etc. are whitelisted)

Are you running Wayland? Make sure Firefox was running in Wayland mode. Fedora had a separate package for Wayland Firefox for some time, though it might be the default in 31. XWayland can result in a performance hit.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Firefox_Wayland_By_De...

I am not using Wayland and I am running XFCE

This has been my experience across Linux distros and was also the case on my MacBook Pro. Whenever I mention my MacBook issues the down voters swarm despite the fact that there is an open bug regarding poor performance on certain MacBook configurations. And no the performance fix for Macs that came out a few months ago didn't resolve it.

Is it faster on Windows? This would be quite fascinating if it is the case - my experience with windows is that it is an all round slacker when it comes to performance.

I remember reading about an issue on some Linux systems, not sure if they fixed it, but do report these issues if you can.

Not sure how, it is not exactly a bug, just ... a thing.