What's really funny is for ages Chrome would load the browser window even if the whole browser UI wasn't done loading, and sometime after Quantum, Firefox started doing the same trick to make you feel as though it instantly runs.
I've been using Firefox for about 20 years or so, and I don't regret it, but also I have not noticed a degrade in performance. I'm using it on Linux so I don't know if that's drastically different on a Mac these days.
I've never had Firefox issues on Linux.
My experience on Linux running on very old hardware (4th Gen Intel) is also good. Firefox feels quick and snappy. It uses a reasonable amount of resources, and has a relatively modest memory footprint by modern browser standards. In comparison, Chromium makes my fans spin on every site and eats several GB of memory.
The annoying part of Firefox is that development seems a bit stagnant in some areas, especially taking into consideration the amount of resources Mozilla has. For example, bookmarks and history still rely on a very old native UI that is quite clunky. Customization via user.js is too imperative and most options are largely undocumented.
It's just an anecdote, but I've had several FF issues on Windows, might be a timeline thing however.
Also, Nvidia is non-negotiable due to performance requirements and local deep learning experiments. I think Nvidia has gotten a lot better lately, even Sway (Wayland window manager) works these days. Incidentally I think the bad firefox framerates were only on i3 and not on Sway.
This is actually not a good test because there are a lot of tricky and subtle things that can make the comparison highly unfair. Smartphones will cache apps so that they don't fully close. Then, if you do actually force kill them they will start up in the background.
Are we surprised a Google phone caches the Google browser which is considered to be a high priority app, commonly used, and even the backbone of other apps?
sometimes i'm reading something on phone and i "send to all devices", i'll sure as shit see it again this way
(even librewolf allows you to continue doing this)
Check with https://webglsamples.org if you don't believe it. All of it runs capped at 60 fps on Chrome for me, Firefox struggles to break 30 on mid tier settings in aquarium and stutters horribly throughout most of them. I'm sure it's fast at loading static sites, but I wouldn't ever use it to run any web app. On Windows they're both the same though, which is weird to me.
Most Mozilla developers are on Mac, most users are on Windows, so Linux have never been the focus.
FF, being a pioneer of privacy (not anymore, with anonym adds): Go to Settings -> type 'advert', turn that off. FF, being a major player in FOSS, and community (irc.mozilla.org etc), now I think they do matrix
Should get their priorities straight. To me, it isn't about market share, but Linux just reached 5% market share in the US https://ostechnix.com/linux-reaches-5-desktop-market-share-i...
Valve sponsors Arch Linux https://www.pcguide.com/news/valve-officially-sponsors-arch-...
I just switched to LibreFox, which is Firefox without all the extra junk it peddles.
We'd think, by now, with video games having advanced crazy rendering engines, AI dark magic, that browsers would have it together by now.
They don't.
Google's been doing advocacy where they do things that either only work on Chrome or just magically works faster there, for a very long time.
Aquarium: 60fps until 20k fish, where I hit 50fps. 30k at 34fps
Blobs: maxed out resolution and number of blobs, still 60fps
Field: 60fps at "lots"
Fishtank: 60fps with 1k fish and sharks
Spacerocks: 60fps on lots
Sprites: 60fps on 10k
I get a bit worse on my M2 Macbook Air (128 tabs), but pretty close results.
Maybe you need to open more tabs?
But it already lags like fuck even without that part running or anything much at all, while being buttersmooth on Chrome almost regardless of how much I load up rendering. It infuriates me to hell because there is no optimization I can make to get equal or even usable performance.
Can you take a profile? https://profiler.firefox.com You can attach it to the bug, or drop it in #perf on https://chat.mozilla.org (Matrix)
> on a demo that looks like it's from the late 2000
The literal visual aesthetics aren't really important for the test. You could place some nicer shaders and it wouldn't necessarily change the compute load. Hell, it could just be highly unoptimized. Benchmarks are mostly about having something static to test, not making something visually pleasing.
[0]https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/requ...
Linux Mint 22 (X11 + Cinnamon)
Firefox 139.0.4
Integrated Graphics (AMD Ryzen 7 5800U)
At 1440p 60Hz monitor, every test that listed FPS showed 60fps, and all others looked the same level of smoothness as Chrome.
Also, i don't understand why people prefer google over open source. And the sometimes disrespectful and destructive criticism of Mozilla.
[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2025/06/chrome-achieves-highest-sc...
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/uncategorized/quick-as-a-fox-fir...
[2] https://hacks.mozilla.org/2023/10/down-and-to-the-right-fire...
[3] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-private-browsing...
> Also, i don't understand why people prefer google over open source. And the sometimes disrespectful and destructive criticism of Mozilla.
But what I don't get is the passionate hate and how the result often ends up being contradictory. Like complaining about FF with that Mr Robot thing (yeah, bad move) and then saying that's why they use Chrome (or some Chromium based browser). It feels like calling someone an idiot for falling face first into dog shit while you're sitting in a jacuzzi full of it. Yeah, both situations are shitty, but come on... there's a lot more shit in one of these...
I hear that a lot, but when I tried Firefox for a couple of months I only found that in a single case[1]. It's really not something that happened to me at all. I did encounter issues with ad blockers breaking sites. Disabling uBO helps quite often on misbehaving sites, but it does so on Chrome as well.
> I am surprised how many people have so many problems with Firefox.
I'm not really. Nor am I surprised it works for you and others. It has been this way with Firefox for all of its 20+ years of existence. In its history it made one big leap in that, somewhat ironically given current affairs, when they removed XUL extensions.
But Firefox has always had weird, unexplainable and unreproducible failure scenarios. Some of that is because of its customizability, but also nobody really cares about it.[2] The standard advice of "throw away your profile and try again" is a huge fuck you to users. 1) People have spend time customizing their browser and throwing that away hurts. 2) It doesn't help anybody. If it's still broken you know nothing, and if it isn't you still don't know what caused it.
I guess that was okay in 2004. Lots of software had weird bugs. Nowadays the competition is much more stable.
For me, I dropped Firefox again after a couple of months fighting to get a stable sync working.[3] It just kept failing on Android. The only resolution was to log out and log back in again. Only for it to break in the next couple of hours. I did the "commit profile suicide and rebirth" thing without a solution.
Chrome's sync at least is very stable. Sometimes it falls an hour or so behind. Not good, but so much better than Firefox.
[1] And that was intentional. Typical Google assholery. Google Photos added (adds?) extra HTML to block right-click on photos when a Firefox User-Agent was used. Using a UA switcher extension "solved" it.
[2] Makers of software for power users so often forget to give power users the tools to investigate issues themselves. It's great you allow me to add so many extensions, how about a detailed log to see which is misbehaving?
[3] Firefox's sync also has fewer features. Bookmarks don't get synced, nor do extension settings.
Extension settings can sync, I don't know exactly if it is opt-in or opt-out but some extensions do sync on desktop. The mobile situation is definitely different, mobile doesn't sync to desktop. I don't know if different mobile devices sync with each other (I only have one).
Yeah, I meant search engines. https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=44647014
> Extension settings can sync, I don't know exactly if it is opt-in or opt-out but some extensions do sync on desktop.
I mostly tried with uBO. Couldn't get it to work.
uBlock Origin does it's own weird thing where you need to trigger the sync in the settings interface. I don't think you can blame Firefox for this UX choice.
Search engines can have completion; keyword bookmarks can't. Most search engines don't support it, but some do.
> uBlock Origin does it's own weird thing where you need to trigger the sync in the settings interface. I don't think you can blame Firefox for this UX choice.
It made the same choice in Chrome, so I was familiar with that. It works there, it doesn't work on Firefox. I think it's fair to put that on Firefox.
It is also very annoying when the first step of every troubleshooting process is "Try using Google Chrome" and if it works the consider your problem solved.
*Search engines. Bookmark sync works fine.
I honestly think it's just something people here like to complain about. It's a complete non-issue. No everyday web experience is even close to being noticeably different. Full stop. It's almost like a meme, people say it because they think they should say it. I would ask those people that are complaining, what are you doing with all those extra milliseconds you claim you're saving?
Watching more ads.
I don't think it's frustrating to press Ctrl+L, Ctrl+C, $launcher-bind(Meta+D), Ctrl+L, Ctrl+V, Enter to open another browser.
My average experience is a lot better with Firefox and that's what I optimize for.
If you haven't used Firefox in a minute, I recommend trying it oht again.
2014: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=8606879
2016: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=10877810
2018: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/91i0mc/youtube...
2018: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=18697824
2019: https://archive.is/tgIH9
2019: https://www.thurrott.com/google/207371/google-now-forces-mic...
2020: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=22422522
2023: https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_ha...
2024: https://www.hackerneue.com/item?id=41379517
2024: https://xcancel.com/brave/status/1870172541907550496
2025: Whatever you're referring to.
There are a few point to unpacck here:
- Qualifying a statement with "Full stop" is a thought-terminating cliche.
- Due to the different hardware, operating systems, and use cases people have, peoples' experience, and the problems they encounter vary between users of PC software.
- Milliseconds as overhead to startup may be irrelevant. Ms in most computing contexts is a timescale to be concerned with, as it's relevant for latency, cumulative operations, and responsiveness.Yeah, well I like it. Full stop.
There's a bug on Linux where background windows continue rendering, even if they're in an inactive workspace or not visible in any other way. This really hits performance, but it doesn't seem to be fixable due to some limitation on GTK3.
If I hide/resize my system status-bar, every single window gets resized to match the new available screen space. Firefox re-renders all content in all windows, causing multiple CPUs to spike to 100%.
See: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1880467
In fact, there are a lot of bugs which are basically "unfixable due to limitations in GTK3". So the experience is likely quite different that on other platforms.
Regrettably, there don't seem to by any plans to move away from GTK in future.
For "single-instance applications" like firefox, launching a new firefox while the existing one is frozen will hang, so instead of launching /usr/bin/firefox directory I have an intermediate ~/.local/bin/firefox script that unfreezes the firefox cgroup and then exec's /usr/bin/firefox.
Of course if at least one FF window is visible then this doesn't help with your problem, since the cgroup as a whole will be unfrozen. It only helps if none of the FF windows are visible.
Other than that, it works well enough for me. My only beef is I can't completely disable tabs, but I don't know of any equivalent browser that can.
There is an addon[1] that allows you to discard tabs both manually and with a degree of automation. I've been using it for a while and it works quite well.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
In any case there should have been a List of Tabs backup file ( cant remember what is was called ) and you can manually replace it to recover your Tabs.
"About:unloads" allows you to manually unload all tabs.
* Firefox-Hello is a easy to pick example of a broken service run by a 3rd party being imposed on users.
* Pocket is another service I never asked for.
* Instead of focusing on the browser, mozilla puts their effort into an English language database.
It appears to me mozilla does not understand their target audience.
Recently I tried to customize firefox for screen recording and ran into lots of outdated documentation about userChrome.css
The problem with the Internet is that people keep coming up with new standards and sites keep getting infected by JavaScript. Firefox itself has been fine for ages, it is just connecting us to something that gets shittier every day.
https://www.ato.gov.au/online-services/technical-support/min...
> my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops.
My Linux desktop is hooked up to my TV[0] and currently has over 100 YouTube tabs open. I'm going to watch those math videos, I swear, I'm just tired right now and so want to watch garbage.
I do have ublock origin on both machines and some stricter privacy settings, maybe that's it? But otherwise yeah, FF is just as snappy as chrome. Which I do use regularly when on other people's machines.
[0] it's a movie server, gaming machine, and for everything else there's ssh and ydotool (I wish Apple would let me make better iPhone scripts than Shortcuts allows. Shortcuts makes me want to throw my phone against a wall...)
What works best for me now is to do my best at putting tabs in the correct group tbh most gather while debugging and then I can just kill the group when I'm done.
Problem is the ADHD and groups get contaminated. Mostly a few casualties is actually fine but sometimes the group gets too mixed. Eventually I nuke it all
Whenever I've used Chrome I find it weird and annoying. Which just goes to show it's all down to what you're used to.
If people would just try switching they'd find it normal in just a week or so. Are you really going to let Google control your computing just because you can't stand the very mild discomfort associated with change?
Exactly that's the big picture question and I find it mind-boggling when when people can't look past an idiosyncratic user experience to more fundamental things like Google seizing long-term control over web standards, getting rid of ad block, imposing DRM, and creating a paradigm or even its own competitors are increasingly dependent on Chromium development.
Hol up! Are you saying Chrome is the new Internet Explorer?
I'm being facetious...
If so, then I agree. I have said and thought for a long time a lot of developers go all-in with everything google as if google could do no wrong. In short, they have become that which they swore to destroy.
Of course it's not limited to Firefox. I think it happens with everything from people's first experiences of Mastodon, to people having random bad experiences on some particular Linux distribution to any number of other things.
I think to me the most have spending one I saw was people insisting F-Droid had problems that I could never reproduce when I was using it simultaneously across like four or five devices, including a pixel C tablet with lineage OS, and old Nexus 7 also with lineage OS, and two of my phones as I was in the process of transitioning from one to the other.
Oops, meant to say most head spinning. Speech to text strikes again.
This seems to say they do not expect to actually get to full coverage on iOS like the author is talking about? https://help.kagi.com/orion/browser-extensions/ios-ipados-ex...
Even if this was an issue I had noticed (which I hadn't), now that's out the door because no ad blocker in Chrome, so good luck loading all the ads and trackers before getting your content...
I can't believe people keep parroting that... Even if 'chrome is faster and more responsive than firefox' was not a controversial statement (and it very much is), 'chrome with ads is fast' is outright laughable...
If the slop doesn't bother you, stick with Chrome. Plenty of people still watch network/cable TV.
When I open it and start typing, it resets the cursor position to the beginning after I already typed a few words. I assume this is some Next weirdness which requires a hack that only happens to work in Chrome.
How old is it? Is a MacBook Pro wimpy now?
I've never felt impeded by loading speeds, and my ADHD regularly has me forgetting to restart it, to the tune of 100+ tabs open across multiple desktops. My wimply little MacBook Pro doesn't seem to mind.
The only downside I've found is that, because so many people just default to "Chrome or nothing," there's occasionally sites that have bugs because, like was the case in the 90s with Internet Explorer, the site developers took the idiomatic Chrome way of building a feature instead of something universal.