# Why is firefox so slow vs chrome?



## azathoth (Jul 18, 2017)

I run ublock plus

chrome is faster with ads!

wtffff


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## Wozzeck.Live (Jul 18, 2017)

I personally always have issue with Chromium under FreeBSD, for some strange reasons the browser finally hangs a few minutes later..
Since FreeBSD 9, diagnostic is still the same... for me Chromium = bullshit

Since Opera for FreeBSD is not actively developed anymore I use Firefox or Qupzilla
I have had a long time big issues with Midori but it seems at last that it works now (probably an early GTK issue as Midori for Windows has also very serious problems).

Yes Firefox is rather slow this is a known issue even on Windows, but it is reliable and finally works correctly with a correct hardware configuration. The startup is just a little slow.

I have read somewhere that in some future version of Firefox (57 ?) a new set of options should appear in order to adapt as closely as possible to the hardware specifications and gain speed by deactivating some options.

I can just guess that our hardwares are very different. For chromium I have been forced to deactivate the hardware acceleration and I suspect the problem may be here. In fact chromium hardware acceleration seems to be incompatible with most old onboard Intel Chipset (yes I use some old computers).

In fact, if I activate the hardware acceleration, at first sight, the browser seems to work very well and fast, but we rapidly get annoyed by number of interface disturbances : some extension and some buttons have no effect, trying to install or remove extension can freeze the system etc etc

Eventually you use Nvidia, or Radeon newer graphics chipsets so you get a full acceleration and Chromium works fine for you.
I will test one day the official build Google Chrome for Linux (and not Chromium) through the FreeBSD Linux emulator.
On the same machine, Chrome works correctly under Windows (but always with hardware acceleration deactivated)

On Windows I have tested recently Pale Moon a gecko based browser 30% faster than Firefox.
Pale Moon uses the Gecko engine but modifying it by activating or not some "stuffs" in order to keep a good balance between functionalities and performance.

FreeBSD misses choices in web browsers, particularly since the end of the development of Opera with Presto engine (Opera 12).
Opera was the beloved browser of the FreeBSD community : fast, stable, with very few dependencies and compiling blazingly fast.

FreeBSD users are now "orphans". They miss a powerfull web browser tailored for FreeBSD as Opera was.
Opera still works but has more and more problems to render correctly some websites.

If someone could port Pale Moon to FreeBSD it could be a great idea as it could eventually be the good web browser for FreeBSD.


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## Deleted member 9563 (Jul 18, 2017)

Wozzeck.Live said:


> I personally always have issue with Chromium under FreeBSD, for some strange reasons the browser finally hangs a few minutes later..


The same happens here. I haven't tried Chromium without Firefox also running, but presumably I should be able to run all my browsers at the same time. I did install Chromium on a Devuan system because it requires ALSA, which FF no longer supports. Using apulse is too much trouble I think.


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## Deleted member 48958 (Jul 18, 2017)

Yes, IMO too, www/chromium (or www/iridium) isn't very usable on FreeBSD, it always hangs for me too,
and this issue isn't related to hardware, because it hangs on my PC and laptop also (with  FreeBSD installed).

And yes, palemoon (firefox v25 fork) is the best browser. Too bad, that it is not present in the ports tree yet.

Also, personally, I like firefox much, it is much better than chrome (with its native notifications and other questionable features).


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## metsuke (Jul 18, 2017)

Firefox will be getting much faster over time due to several modernization efforts of the Mozilla team, but mostly their usage of Rust should put Firefox ahead of the rest.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jul 18, 2017)

I've talked of the problem with www/chromium several times before here. The issues revolve around how complicated it has become, it needs a huge amount of ram just to build it and the maintainers don't have such a machine, the chromium team and Google are of little help, and, of course, the lack of developers helping out.

The problem with chromium isn't chromium itself but the needs of the developers to find and fix  the problems they have.


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## Deleted member 9563 (Jul 19, 2017)

drhowarddrfine said:


> it needs a huge amount of ram just to build it and the maintainers don't have such a machine


That's interesting. What kind of resources are we talking about here?


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## trev (Jul 19, 2017)

I find it a tad amusing that Firefox is "slow", given that it was ripped out of SeaMonkey (nee Mozilla Suite, nee Netscape Communicator) so it could be "less bloated and faster". I'm still using SeaMonkey for email and browsing and find it fast enough 

And here's a memory comparison (bear in  mind SeaMonkey has both email and web browser windows open):


```
42896 trev        42  20    0  1991M   651M uwait   1   0:47      4.69% firefox
 1911 trev        54  20    0  1125M   779M uwait   1  125:36     0.98% seamonkey
```


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## azathoth (Jul 19, 2017)

I think lispers should make a new superior browser.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jul 19, 2017)

OJ said:


> That's interesting. What kind of resources are we talking about here?


I tried to find it but, the last time I read it, 64GB of ram was a must and, even then, a will take hours.

The published minimum system requirements are 16GB, iirc, but a real developer said it's an unrealistic number and a build takes many hours. You'll also need as many cores as you can get.

EDIT: From looking around, I may have mis-remembered because two chromium devs said "at least 8GB" but some slides from Google said 16GB is a minimum. So I may have mixed it up with "64-bit".


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## Deleted member 48958 (Jul 19, 2017)

drhowarddrfine said:


> The published minimum system requirements are 16GB, iirc, but a real developer said it's an unrealistic number and a build takes many hours. You'll also need as many cores as you can get.


Very strange, several months ago I was able to build chromium on intel q6600 2.4 with 4gb of RAM (and 8G of swap), yes, it took some time... 
I can't say exactly how many, because I always start building such ports when I go to sleep.


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## MarcoB (Jul 19, 2017)

I've tried to build chromium a few times on my Xeon (Nocona 2.8 Ghz 4GB RAM), and that takes about 6 hours. So I don't do that anymore. Firefox takes around 2 hours these days, so thats a lot better. Although build times are increasing, especially of browsers.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jul 19, 2017)

ILUXA said:


> Very strange, several months ago I was able to build chromium on intel q6600 2.4 with 4gb of RAM (and 8G of swap), yes, it took some time...
> I can't say exactly how many, because I always start building such ports when I go to sleep.


The developer's version of chromium is not the same thing as www/chromium. Because I'm a web developer, I build from ports all the time to use the latest version, too.


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## Deleted member 30996 (Jul 28, 2017)

Speed was the main selling point for Firefox when it made its debut. I has regressively gotten slower and slower to load over time.

I use it mainly due to the extensions available for it. NoScript, HTTPS Everywhere, Privacy Badger, Change Referer Button, User Agent Switcher, AdBlock or Ublock, DownloadThemAll and Download YouTube Videos As MP4. The worst thing you can do IMO is run scripts globally when surfing the web. I like Seamonkey but its been marked as vulnerable for as long as I can remember.

I tried chromium once and it took ages to build for me, too. It has so many frequent updates for vulnerabilities I'd spend more time compiling it than using it. It has its roots in Google, too.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jul 28, 2017)

Well, Firefox has finally moved on to adding more than one process and will continue to add more in the same way Chrome and chromium did years ago.

Firefox was known for speed but my first contact with it was version 0.8 as I was just getting into web development. My son pushed me into using it cause I couldn't understand why the HTML and CSS specifications said to do things one way but they didn't work in Internet Explorer. Once I quickly figured out IE was the bad guy, I predicted IE would lose 30% of its market share in three years.

It actually took five but then I said IE would become a minor player in the browser world. 

I'm a genius!


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## rigoletto@ (Aug 1, 2017)

*@*Wozzeck.Live

You may want to take a look on www/iridium.


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## drhowarddrfine (Aug 1, 2017)

Wozzeck.Live Your language is not appreciated on this forum which tries to keep an air of professionalism.


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## jailed (Aug 2, 2017)

I can confirm too that Chromium is much faster compared to Firefox. However, Chromium has so much bugs. Tabs are freezing randomly and using the browser is pain. I had to use Firefox then. But it is very slow and this is another pain source.

I have 8 core CPU with 64 GB RAM and SSD setup on my desktop. My current resource usage is, 4% CPU usage and about 30 GB completely free RAM space. Although I have plenty amount of free system resources and low IO, Firefox runs very slow and it makes very poor user experience.

I'm using FreeBSD since version 4. This browser problems in the last versions make me uncomfortable while using my desktop to develop my projects. I don't know how this browsers works on other operating systems. But I cannot imagine myself using another operating system. I feel like a fish out of water when I sit in front of a Windows box.

I hope this problems will be fixed for Firefox and Chromium in next versions.


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## Deleted member 9563 (Aug 2, 2017)

What exactly is it that people are finding slow in Firefox? I see differences between plain text (such as html/css) sites and those using a bunch of other stuff, so saying that FF is slow doesn't really tell me much. Slow at *what*?


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## jailed (Aug 2, 2017)

OJ said:


> What exactly is it that people are finding slow in Firefox? I see differences between plain text (such as html/css) sites and those using a bunch of other stuff, so saying that FF is slow doesn't really tell me much. Slow at *what*?



Problems with Firefox on my side:
1) When you try to scroll the page, it response a few seconds later.
2) Even while I'm writing this post on my Firefox, I see what I type a few seconds later. I am writing this with Firefox and I see the letters I type after 2-3 seconds.
3) When I try to switch between tabs, it response seconds later.

When I do the same things and visiting same websites on Chromium, it is way faster and I never face the same slowness. But Chromium has its own problems. Some websites are repeatedly crashing and not responding/loading on Chromium. Even if it's very fast compared to Firefox, using Chromium is another pain because of tab crashes. Sometimes you have to close the tab, reload it maybe 10-15 times. For these reasons, for my active usage, I am using Firefox on FreeBSD even if it's slow. Because it never crashes. I only use Chromium for the websites which I have to monitor regularly and running without crash.

I'm facing this problems with both Firefox and Chromium for last 2-3 years. Last versions of both browsers are having their own problems.

Again, I prefer using Firefox as my main browser, I love Firefox, but I hate living this bad user experience.


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## rigoletto@ (Aug 2, 2017)

I use Firefox exclusively, and I have not experienced any slowness. Eventually Chromium could be a bit faster but it would certainly not be anything dramatic, at least here.

The only slowness related problem I got with Firefox in FreeBSD is the same I got in every other OS I used it. After some time (usually a few months) I do need to "reset" Firefox, like a new install.

Since I do have backup of the bookmarks, the relevant `about:config` customizations and I do use very little extensions, it does not take more than 20 minutes to have it working as I like again.

Cheers!


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## sidetone (Aug 2, 2017)

If you build Firefox from ports, it's faster, and it runs smooth. It is better with the lang/rust option. From packages, it lags and crashes at times.


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## Deleted member 9563 (Aug 2, 2017)

jailed said:


> Problems with Firefox on my side:
> 1) When you try to scroll the page, it response a few seconds later.
> 2) Even while I'm writing this post on my Firefox, I see what I type a few seconds later. I am writing this with Firefox and I see the letters I type after 2-3 seconds.
> 3) When I try to switch between tabs, it response seconds later.



Thanks. Yes, I've seen all those. I'm not convinced that those are Firefox problems though. The scrolling may be, but not sure. The delay I've seen on this forum only. I believe this forum software is buggy. Using Firefox for some hours every day for some years, I've never seen tab slowness - so that's probably not Firefox. I also run my tabs down the side in a way that requires 3 plugins to do, so you'd think it would be more likely here.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to defend Firefox. But it seems to me that when I run it on a fresh Linux system (which I've had opportunity to do on several occasions lately) there is only fast response in all cases. This leads me to believe that it is something related to other aspects of the OS that we see with a loaded system, and perhaps also OS specific.


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## jailed (Aug 2, 2017)

sidetone said:


> If you build Firefox from ports, it's faster, and it runs smooth. It is better with the lang/rust option. From packages, it lags and crashes at times.



I always build Firefox from ports. And lang/rust option is enabled in the configuration as default. Also I have no extensions.

Firefox on FreeBSD is really very slow as mentioned by other posters in this thread. In the last 2-3 years, I reinstalled all new FreeBSD versions from scratch. Also our office completely runs FreeBSD desktops in different computers.

I understand that some users has no problems with Firefox or Chromium. We use both of the browsers, but generally using Firefox as main browser. But, this does not change our opinion that it is really slow. The browser experience is sometimes really annoying that we are sometimes using remote desktop with Linux boxes and Chromium four our needs.

As I wrote in my previous posts, my CPU usage is about 3-4 percent on 8 core CPU and I have about 30 GB completely free and unused RAM space, tmpfs enabled and multiple SSD/RAID setup and 2 x 8 GB graphic cards exists on this computer. And this computer has no serious load. I use Thunderbird, XMMS, Firefox and Chromium open. And I am writing code on vim in the shell. But even while I am writing this post, browser responds to my typing seconds later. I see what I write at least 1-2 seconds later.

I always build the programs from ports with standard configuration.

Until 2-3 years ago, there wasn't any problem with both Firefox and Chromium. But for now, I think both of them are buggy.


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## jailed (Aug 2, 2017)

OJ said:


> Thanks. Yes, I've seen all those. I'm not convinced that those are Firefox problems though. The scrolling may be, but not sure. The delay I've seen on this forum only. I believe this forum software is buggy. Using Firefox for some hours every day for some years, I've never seen tab slowness - so that's probably not Firefox. I also run my tabs down the side in a way that requires 3 plugins to do, so you'd think it would be more likely here.
> 
> Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to defend Firefox. But it seems to me that when I run it on a fresh Linux system (which I've had opportunity to do on several occasions lately) there is only fast response in all cases. This leads me to believe that it is something related to other aspects of the OS that we see with a loaded system, and perhaps also OS specific.



Thank you for your thoughts. I am not facing these problems with FreeBSD Forums only. I am facing these problems on every website. After I start to use Firefox for some time, it start to get slow. And as I mentioned in my previous posts, this is not related with computer load. Because my computer is really capable of running these software without any problem.

Also I don't try to discredit Firefox or Chromium. What I try to say is, this software are started to be very buggy in last versions of last 2-3 years. Chromium is really having serious problems on FreeBSD. It is way way faster than Firefox on FreeBSD platform, but it has its own problems, crashing randomly and frequently. Because of this crashes, we have to use Firefox even if we think that it's slower than Chromium.

We only use Chromium on Linux for remote desktop. The same crashing problems don't appear there. I don't have any thought about Windows since I don't use it. We strongly prefer using FreeBSD, we love it. And I really wish that this browser problems will be solved very shortly.


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## forquare (Aug 2, 2017)

I wonder if it depends on Desktop Environment?  

Using Xfce (inside a VM, i7-6600U 2x2.6GHz, 4GB RAM, tmpfs for /tmp) I don't personally see much slowness with Firefox _most_ of the time, however when loading pages with lots of javascript or lots of tabs at the same time there is considerable slowness.  But I don't experience the other slowness.


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## drhowarddrfine (Aug 2, 2017)

Apparently not many people read previous posts, or forget them, but look through my previous posts for a short explanation of what is going on for everyone here. I've posted the same information umpteen times over the years.


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## hruodr (Aug 7, 2017)

I think, when talking about browsers, rendering is, unfortunately, much more important than speed.

One needs the bloated browser for reading bloated web-pages of others. Not every browser is able to render any web-page. Web-pages are written for the most used browsers known to the web-developers. You must accept the very intelligent browser for very stupid people that the smart web-developer decided you must use. I think, we have not much alternatives: firefox, chrome.

I distrust in the meantime both. Chrome sends data to google. After I installed firefox again, it was able to find a bookmarks file hidden in my home directory hierarchy for importing it. Perhaps one should run them in a jail, even if one do commercial transactions with them.

BTW, w3m is a nice tool to extract text from some unreadable, bloated web-pages.


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