On the other hand, FF on Windows is blazing fast. So I doubt it's just XUL.
Edit: wow, they did Safari-like pixel-precise touchpad scrolling (OSX). Very nice.
1. Every extension you add seems to decrease performance by 30-50% (rough numbers) [1]. So live with a bare essential set of extensions. For me that is Firebug and FlashBlock.
2. Keeping very many bookmarks or history items seems to destroy performance, particularly with the "awesome bar." I disable history completely and have it clear everything else on browser close.
Before I settled on this FF usage technique, FF would degrade in performance over the course of months as it built up data in the profile. Eventually it would become unusable [2] until I deleted the profile and started fresh. Now I just prevent it from building up any data.
[1] As much as I used to like this extension, my experience has been that ForecastFox in particular hammers browser performance.
[2] It would take seconds, sometimes 10 or more, to open a new tab to about:blank. With this technique though, I currently have ~ 25 tabs open, and new tab creation is instantaneous.
http://webupd8.blogspot.com/2009/05/speed-up-firefox-by-moun...
It's fairly easy. There's a guide just for Ubuntu, too:
BUT, I clear everything but saved passwords every month or so. It goes back to being snappy right away. You don't get those results even with a new install as it doesn't delete old data.
I think the chrome team must have known this. In the clear history dialog it lets you clear only "last week", month, etc which is perfect. I wish they would automate that though.
Amen to that. I have ~12,000 bookmarks, and FF3 on Windows takes ~10 seconds to both start up and shut down.
Why shouldn't I? Firefox 2 handled it fine.
Iceweasel is slower to start than would be ideal, really it's always been so but certain add-ons definitely seem to affect start-up time. But I've never experienced any of these more extreme issues that I hear a large number of people reporting. Nor have I experienced these kinds of issues on any of my other machines (running Windows XP and OS X Leopard on these machines and their resources were/are similar to or better than my T60). I wonder why this is? Is it because I'm not running Iceweasel/FF on a single core machine with < 1GB of RAM?
For the people who are having issues with Iceweasel/FF, what are the resources on your machines like? I totally believe you guys that these issues exist, I've read too many reports to doubt them all, I just wonder why I've never experienced them.
If that's the case, then I applaud the effort, as getting the masses moved from IE[6/7/8] to Firefox 3.5 is certainly a more valuable effort than besting Safari performance on Mac OS X. There's just a big part of me that hopes they can achieve both. :-)
Edit: Was this downmodded by people who actually close their browser during the day? Those that don't should up-mod it.
I don't disagree that applications (and operating systems) should start up quickly, but it hardly seems like a critical complaint. And, as much as I appreciate improved Javascript performance, the differences are not that significant in the real-world.
Furthermore, your question calls for a yes/no answer, which is hardly contributing to the conversation.
As for the why he closes the browser, I don't know. Maybe RAM scarcity... But it isn't wonderfully interesting to have that kind of anecdotal conversations here.
The problem is, compared to Chrome and Safari, it's a dog.
I've been running the nightly (Shiretoko) for weeks now, and, like everyone else, I'm hopelessly addicted to various extensions during heavy browsing sessions (development, etc).. but when I want to pop up a browser, check something quickly, and move on with my life, Safari is the browser of choice. The initial launch speed and JS performance are orders of magnitude faster.
Gecko is a great layout engine, but my gut feeling is that XUL and friends are holding it back. Agree? Disagree?