I never understand people who say Firefox is as fast as Chrome. It's nowhere close, and can't be.

My normal use case is to open 15 tabs, all at once, from a single page (e.g. Hacker News homepage).

Firefox is single-threaded, as far as I know, and the whole interface freezes while it does the heavy lifting in loading the contents for each new tab. It takes me 30 seconds total of waiting 2-3 seconds for each tab to load, just so I can scroll/click on a new link.

Whereas with Chrome, I just breeze through clicking on all the links, it takes 5 seconds total, and every other tab starts loading on separate threads. I can switch to the loaded ones instantly.

This has nothing to do with extensions, and everything to do with the fact that Chrome has a separate UI thread and separate threads per-tab.

Please correct me if anything I'm saying is wrong...

Firefox is single process (mostly – some plugins run in separate processes), but multi-threaded. There's one thread for the main UI, but as much work as possible is done asynchronously off of that thread.

Browsers are very complex software and there is a lot that goes into browser performance.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubu...

I just tried your experiment on Chrome and yep, it was faster than Firefox, but by no means was Firefox slow. Sure, the UI slowed down a touch for the few seconds it took to load the pages (framerate dropped while I scrolled up and down) but it wasn’t unusable and I definitely didn’t have to wait 30 seconds - didn’t have to wait at all.

Maybe I’ve just got a decent-spec machine here at work (quad i5, 12gb ram)…

I use a 2010 MBA (with SSD). Not super-fast, but not ancient either.

I would love to be able to scroll while other tabs were starting their loading!

That should be easily fast enough. If you don’t care about your Firefox profile but want to try Firefox again occasionally then I’d just blow it away and create a fresh one. It lives in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox.

By the way, sorry you’re being downvoted. You’re adding to the conversation, not trolling.

Firefox is not single-threaded.

Firefox is multi-threaded but single process.