Huge performance degredation with Firefox 38

By kozukumi
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kozukumi

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Anyone else noticed huge performance problems with Firefox 38 over previous versions?

 

I noticed it when I had a dozen or so pages open and playing a video using a flash player. Not sure if it is Firefox or Flash as Flash silently updates itself. Just wondered if anyone else has seen this too?

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Wakers

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Flash in Firefox has been all sorts of terrible for the last 4 or 5 versions now. Not sure where the problem is either - but having 2 windows of Firefox open (one on each monitor) - if one is a flash video and the other just browsing, every time you load a page the video stutters.

 

Doesn't happen in any other browser.

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Gabe84

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Yes, Firefox 38 here and Firefox in general has been terrible with both Flash and Silverlight for at least 2/3 years.

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LaP

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Anyone else noticed huge performance problems with Firefox 38 over previous versions?

 

I noticed it when I had a dozen or so pages open and playing a video using a flash player. Not sure if it is Firefox or Flash as Flash silently updates itself. Just wondered if anyone else has seen this too?

 

I did. I installed Disable Flash and the problem is solved ;)

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Boo Berry

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Have you tried backing up your profile, going to about:support and refreshing Firefox with a clean profile? Also, what browser extensions do you use?

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Brandon H Supervisor

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Flash: The bane of the Internet, strikes again.

yep.

 

there are only 2 reasons I still have flash installed

1. Twitch

2. the Anime website I use doesn't have html5 players yet (and I haven't found a site I like better)

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Wakers

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Disabling Flash doesn't really help if the site I'm using doesn't have an alternative player available.

 

If it works fine in other browsers, I'll just use a different browser.

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kozukumi

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According to Ars Technica, switching on tracking protection reduces page load times in FF by up to 44%.

 

Just go to about:config and double click on privacy.trackingprotection.enabled to set it to true.

 

Might be worth pointing out that enabling the tracking protection in Firefox will also make it block a lot of ads automatically such as the ones on Neowin.

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Chicane-UK Veteran

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I'm not sure if it's just me but have web browsers become an entire world of pain in the last couple of years, or what? I use both MacOS X and Windows both at home and work. 

 

My PC at home is an old i7 with 8GB RAM and a GTX560Ti video card, and a fairly crap-free install of Windows 8.1 Firefox on that is utter crap - it's so slow, flash videos reduce the whole machine to a crawl. I'm finding similar nonsense lately in both Chrome and even Safari which, up until now, had been extremely slick and smooth.

 

But Firefox is definitely the worst offender by some margin. It's bordering on un-usably bad these days. And whilst I accept my old desktop PC isn't a power house, it's not exactly a dinosaur and should be able to run a web browser without being bought to it's knees!? 

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kozukumi

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I'm not sure if it's just me but have web browsers become an entire world of pain in the last couple of years, or what? I use both MacOS X and Windows both at home and work. 

 

My PC at home is an old i7 with 8GB RAM and a GTX560Ti video card, and a fairly crap-free install of Windows 8.1 Firefox on that is utter crap - it's so slow, flash videos reduce the whole machine to a crawl. I'm finding similar nonsense lately in both Chrome and even Safari which, up until now, had been extremely slick and smooth.

 

But Firefox is definitely the worst offender by some margin. It's bordering on un-usably bad these days. And whilst I accept my old desktop PC isn't a power house, it's not exactly a dinosaur and should be able to run a web browser without being bought to it's knees!? 

 

It is hard to tell. Websites are so much more complicated than they were just a few years ago. They are JS crazy. We have seen a lot of amazing gains in JS performance thanks to Chrome for giving Mozilla a kick up the ass. And we have seen things like asm.js from Mozilla. Personally I find Chrome to be the worst performer, at least on Windows.

 

I like Firefox. It works well and until this issue I have not had any reason to complain about performance. Flash is the biggest offender. I wish I could get by without it but so many sites (looking at you BBC News) need Flash for their embedded video which sucks.

 

Most websites are not really sites anymore but full blown applications. Things like Outlook.com, Office Online, Dropbox, etc. are applications not sites.

 

My only computer is a 2.53Ghz Core 2 Duo mobile (T9400), 4GB RAM and an awful ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 256MB but Firefox still performs well even with 40+ tabs open which I often do. Considering how much a web browser has to do these days I think it performs pretty good.

 

Now if you want to talk about extensions and plugins then that is a different story! Some extensions can kill Firefox and Chrome in a few minutes. It is shocking. I wish Firefox had a default profiler for extensions that alerted you if an extension is slowing the browser down. I know there are profilers for this but I want something built into the browser that works automatically and has a simple prompt to the user with something like "Extension XYZ is causing Firefox to perform badly, do you want to disable this extension?". Simple.

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The_Decryptor Veteran

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It was originally Safari that kicked off the JS performance race (SquirrelFish is still the best name for a product I've ever heard), since then they've all caught up and now we're talking about performance differences of like 1.5ms on microbenchmarks.

Anyway, go to about:support and look at the graphics section, generally you want OMTC enabled, Direct2D enabled, DirectWrite enabled, and Direct3D 11 compositing enabled. If some of those aren't enabled you'll be using software rendering for some things, and that's slow (And one known performance regression in 38, people with awful GPUs that hit a pathologically bad performance issue in system libraries)

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+therealDamien Subscriber¹

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I have the opposite problem.

 

while chrome appears to be fast at time. it eats almost 100% when loading pages. so my cpu fan revs up and down when using chrome.

 

also sometimes for no reason on my end, it will decide not to load pages correctly . sometimes that happens on neowin. I go over to firefox and website is fine.

 

but I have not used ie 11 or sparten(edge) much at all.

 

 

firefox seems to load at great and stable speed.

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SecretAgentMan

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I have also noticed some performance issues with Firefox in the past few months.  Every so often when I go to the Android Police website to check on phone news my mouse cursor pauses for around 4-5 seconds then resumes as normal.

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Max Norris

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Firefox overall is pretty fast for me, the only time I notice a performance hit is on the really script-heavy sites (Outlook, Amazon, etc) and it's not that bad unless I have a few tabs loading them at the same time.  Aggressive filtering probably helps too, a lot less for it to deal with.  Flash hasn't been an issue for me, but I usually keep it disabled too, have the "FlashDisable" addon so I can toggle it on and off via a click on the toolbar, wish I had that in Chrome, but I only frequent like 2 sites that still require it anymore anyway, never mind keeping it off normally for security reasons. 

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+Frank B. Subscriber²

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All browsers suck, some less than others.

 

There are too many variables. Badly coded JavaScript, crappy plug-ins (I'm looking at you, Flash), resource-hogging browser extensions.. it all adds up. In the end you have to find the right compromise to find the right browser for you.

 

Ironically Firefox is among the most lightweight major browsers today, despite the age-old accusation of 'It's bloated!'

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cork1958

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When I first updated to version Firefox version 38 on one machine of mine, it was so slow it was useless. Did some searching and found that disabling hardware acceleration was what I needed to do. It's a known issue in that version for some people.

 

I know flash is a total POS, but hard NOT to have it installed still but it's so easy to simply disable and enable when needed, i don't even consider that to be a problem.


I'm not sure if it's just me but have web browsers become an entire world of pain in the last couple of years, or what? I use both MacOS X and Windows both at home and work. 

 

My PC at home is an old i7 with 8GB RAM and a GTX560Ti video card, and a fairly crap-free install of Windows 8.1 Firefox on that is utter crap - it's so slow, flash videos reduce the whole machine to a crawl. I'm finding similar nonsense lately in both Chrome and even Safari which, up until now, had been extremely slick and smooth.

 

But Firefox is definitely the worst offender by some margin. It's bordering on un-usably bad these days. And whilst I accept my old desktop PC isn't a power house, it's not exactly a dinosaur and should be able to run a web browser without being bought to it's knees!? 

 

Sheesh! If that's your OLD machine, can I have it? Out of the 7 Windows machines I have, none of them are any where near that new/modern, but they all run just fine! ;)

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kozukumi

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I have also noticed some performance issues with Firefox in the past few months.  Every so often when I go to the Android Police website to check on phone news my mouse cursor pauses for around 4-5 seconds then resumes as normal.

 

Just tried Android Police and it works fine for me. No mouse lock ups or anything. The site is pretty heavy though I agree.

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+Red King Subscriber²

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I noticed Firefox doesn't repaint the tab - I switch from tab A to tab B. First I still see tab A and then, partially at first, tab B's content starts showing.

Very annoying.

 

But, I hope everyone realizes, Firefox is becoming ad-supported and some major developers left.

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max22

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I noticed Firefox doesn't repaint the tab - I switch from tab A to tab B. First I still see tab A and then, partially at first, tab B's content starts showing.

Very annoying.

 

But, I hope everyone realizes, Firefox is becoming ad-supported and some major developers left.

 

I thought this was one of my add-ons. Guess not.

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The_Decryptor Veteran

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...

But, I hope everyone realizes, Firefox is becoming ad-supported and some major developers left.

That did not happen.

Edit: I mean, a few devs have left, but they've hired other devs, you don't spend your entire life making a single program.

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