Slow Firefox?

[doktornotor]

And on the flawed methodology and "Mozilla should clean up in their own department first" note: https://adblockplus.org/blog/some-more-details-on-mozilla-s-add-on-performance-measurements

As the test results for Adblock Plus with EasyList (here tested with all the caching introduced in Adblock Plus 1.3.5) indicate, we have bigger worries than whether Adblock Plus is installed packed or unpacked. Having a filter lists adds 250 ms to the startup time for me. Out of these, 200 ms are spent by Gecko parsing the element hiding stylesheet — not something I can really influence. The only way is having EasyList reduce the number of filters somehow (currently it has 11 thousands).

[Hermite15]

yeah just as an example: Xmarks and FlashGot are in the top list, and I'm not gonna blame the extension devs for - according to Mozilla - not writing their code properly. I'll blame Firefox extension system code in the first place. I'm no dev, but the issue is definitely a Firefox issue. Other browsers use extensions and don't have the startup issues that FF always had.

 So in the meantime, I'll keep using the extensions that I need... at least for the few times I still use Firefox. Rest of the time, Chrome does a good job thanks

[DavidR]

Personally I have never been that bothered by the loading/startup time of firefox as I only start it once a day. When I first got it a long time ago and before I started collecting add-ons to make my browsing safer/better and to help in the way I use the browser, my startup time was around 8 seconds.

A lot of water has crossed under the bridge since FF 1.5 I think it was when I started using it as my default browser. Now we have FF4 and I have approaching 30 add-ons and my startup time is of the order of 12 seconds and that is with usually four tabs being opened from my previous session.

So what would/could I do if I managed to get back those 4 seconds or perhaps a little more time, not a lot. We have all become very impatient in the internet age and fast broadband if something doesn't happen instantly we want to know why or more likely we are annoyed.

[Asyn]

We have all become very impatient in the internet age and fast broadband if something doesn't happen instantly we want to know why or more likely we are annoyed.

Well spoken, Dave...!!
When the times get measured in milliseconds, thats all quite useless.
Even, if FF would take 10 secs to start (which it doesn't, btw), I would use it..!!
I prefer flexibility/adjustability over pure speed.

[YoKenny]

We have all become very impatient in the internet age and fast broadband if something doesn't happen instantly we want to know why or more likely we are annoyed.

Well spoken, Dave...!!
When the times get measured in milliseconds, thats all quite useless.
Even, if FF would take 10 secs to start (which it doesn't, btw), I would use it..!!
I prefer flexibility/adjustability over pure speed.

Flexibility to the point of collapse.

[Asyn]

Flexibility to the point of collapse.

There's nothing to collapse here.
Btw, flexibility prevents collapses...!!!

[scythe944]

What about using Palemoon instead?  You're all running Windows, right? http://www.palemoon.org/

[DavidR]

Flexibility to the point of collapse.

There's nothing to collapse here.
Btw, flexibility prevents collapses...!!!

What a total plonker YoKenny, keeping up your usual standards. When you won't use firefox you have zero practical experience of it, so your opinion is about as much use as a chocolate ashtray.

[Asyn]

What a total plonker YoKenny, keeping up your usual standards. When you won't use firefox you have zero practical experience of it, so your opinion is about as much use as a chocolate ashtray.

He's so fixated on IE, he won't ever test anything else, I guess.

[koam]

Check your add-ons on this list.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/performance/#addon-11

My firefox was so slow that I just uninstalled it including all my data and customizations.  If I ever try it it again it will be a clean start.  I use Chrome now.

[DavidR]

What about using Palemoon instead?  You're all running Windows, right? http://www.palemoon.org/

I have just given it a test run and it is certainly better optimised. Cold startup took a little under 5 seconds, not using a stopwatch just the second hand on my desktop clock. As some of you will know on my XP Pro system I run all my browsers, email, internet facing programs via DropMyRights (DMR).  So I setup my shortcut to run Palemoon under DMR, now I expected that to add a little to the startup time, but was pleasantly surprised that the time was negligible at 5 seconds.

So considerably quicker at startup than FF4 even though this is a FF4 build optimised.

I even downloaded the Migration tool and after a little fight with my firewall protecting firefox () the migration tool completed successfully.

When I ran Palemoon for the first time I was surprised to see that the tabs I had open when I closed FF4 opened in Palemoon, so the profile migration tool worked very well. I checked my Add-ons and found masses of then not compatible which were compatible in FF4. A quick check for updates resolved most/all of these other than the three that weren't compatible in FF4 either.

All in all a very good experience of migrating a profile, which can be a nightmare with some tools.

So I will give it a test run as my default browser for a while.

[scythe944]

Cool, sounds good.  It takes them a little while to build new versions but it's usually only a few days.

I don't really use it often, I still prefer chrome, but I'm not stuck on any specific browser. I switch around quite a bit.

[DavidR]

Don't know why after my initial testing a cold start with Pale Moon is now 8-10 seconds, still faster than my installation of FF4. I don't know if it was able to take advantage of any previously loaded firefox processes.

But it is still doing very well and I think that in normal browsing it may be a little quicker, but not something I could test. It does also have some options not in FF4.

[scythe944]

Don't know why after my initial testing a cold start with Pale Moon is now 8-10 seconds, still faster than my installation of FF4. I don't know if it was able to take advantage of any previously loaded firefox processes.

But it is still doing very well and I think that in normal browsing it may be a little quicker, but not something I could test. It does also have some options not in FF4.

That's one of the reasons that I don't use FF and it's variants exclusively.  It always takes a while to start. I assume it's because it checks for updates and obviously starting the different add-ons.  Nice browser, but not quite perfect enough for me to use constantly.

[DavidR]

Well you don't have to check for updates automatically, in fact it is only recently that I have enabled this. For years as a dial-up user you generally don't allow auto update and installation for anything, avast generally being my only exception.