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View Full Version : What happened to Firefox?



kaldor
March 26th, 2010, 02:58 AM
Firefox isn't really that good anymore. Sure, it has lots of good features and great website compatibility, but its future is beginning to look poor.

Examples...

-Safari takes about 1 second to load on Snow Leopard for me during its first run. Firefox takes 5-10.

-It's much slower. Much. Even without addons.

-It crashes often in Karmic. WAY too much. 3.5 was a disaster when it first came out too, with frequent crashes.

-What ever happened to speed? Not only startup speed, but Firefox is notably slower than Chrome, Safari and other browsers. I'd even go as far as to say that IE8 is faster by now. I'm not talking with addons either; I mean vanilla Firefox.

themarker0
March 26th, 2010, 03:00 AM
I don't see that. 3ghz cpu 1.5gb ram, and i have 30-60 tabs open at anytime.

kaldor
March 26th, 2010, 03:20 AM
I'm finding this with every computer that I have seen Firefox running on. That's 5 different machines.

JDShu
March 26th, 2010, 03:26 AM
Since you're using vanilla firefox, maybe you haven't done any optimizations?

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/speed-up-firefox-web-browser.html

CptPicard
March 26th, 2010, 03:28 AM
-It crashes often in Karmic. WAY too much. 3.5 was a disaster when it first came out too, with frequent crashes.


It's probably Flash that's crashing. It is horribly buggy. Firefox has the annoying property of having all tabs in the same process as the plugin too so everything goes down with it. Chrome is far better in that regard.

mikewhatever
March 26th, 2010, 03:28 AM
Been running 3.5 and 3.6 on Karmic, no crashes, runs great.

d3v1150m471c
March 26th, 2010, 03:32 AM
I don't see that. 3ghz cpu 1.5gb ram, and i have 30-60 tabs open at anytime.

lol why on earth would you have 30-60 tabs open? My wife does that with windows and icons and it drives me up a wall.

Wiebelhaus
March 26th, 2010, 03:36 AM
Working fine here but I flop back and forth , I really dig Chrome to.

NightwishFan
March 26th, 2010, 03:39 AM
I do not like Desktop Icons or Widgets either. As for Firefox, it takes a while to start on mine too, but runs excellent when open.

Wiebelhaus
March 26th, 2010, 03:41 AM
I do not like Desktop Icons or Widgets either. As for Firefox, it takes a while to start on mine too, but runs excellent when open.

Any fan of Nightwish is good people! :)

Frak
March 26th, 2010, 03:44 AM
I always thought Firefox ran just fine. Then I used Chrome and I didn't have as many slowdowns. Plus, when a tab crashed, only that one tab crashed and not everything. In comparison, Firefox's future looks bleak.

NightwishFan
March 26th, 2010, 03:46 AM
I have nothing against Chrome except that I do not want to make my desktop all Google any more than I want to purchase the entire iLife suite. I prefer Epiphany, but it needs to work out a few usability issues, I actually plan to ask them about it.

sudoer541
March 26th, 2010, 03:53 AM
Firefox isn't really that good anymore. Sure, it has lots of good features and great website compatibility, but its future is beginning to look poor.

Examples...

-Safari takes about 1 second to load on Snow Leopard for me during its first run. Firefox takes 5-10.

-It's much slower. Much. Even without addons.

-It crashes often in Karmic. WAY too much. 3.5 was a disaster when it first came out too, with frequent crashes.

-What ever happened to speed? Not only startup speed, but Firefox is notably slower than Chrome, Safari and other browsers. I'd even go as far as to say that IE8 is faster by now. I'm not talking with addons either; I mean vanilla Firefox.


on my windows xp, firefox takes 1.5 seconds to open (I have like 6 plug ins installed and a slow PC that does not meet today's standards.)


edit: my pc specs : AMD 64 (2.2 GHz single core+ 1GB ram + xp SP3)
something wrong on your end?

uRock
March 26th, 2010, 04:06 AM
After trying Chrome and Chromium, there are two things that keep FF on my system.
[LIST=1]
1. My school requires IE or FF to access my online classes.
2. Private browsing.(I know it can be done in Chromium, but haven't tried.)

One thing that bothers me with FF is when I am surfing one of my other forums the RAM starts loading up and after an hour all 2GB of my RAM will be full and the swap will start filling up. I don't know if Chromium dumps the memory for each tab as it is closed, but if it does, then it is the biggest winner.

eksasol
March 26th, 2010, 04:50 AM
For private browsing in Chomium its called Incognito mode: Ctrl+Shift+N.


I don't see that. 3ghz cpu 1.5gb ram, and i have 30-60 tabs open at anytime. Not everyone have a computer as fast. Especially if its a netbook or older computer for a school or library. I have used Firefox on older computers and compare it with Chromium and Opera, it is slower. There are many alternative browsers though.

teKro
March 26th, 2010, 05:19 AM
After trying Chrome and Chromium, there are two things that keep FF on my system.[LIST=1]
1. My school requires IE or FF to access my online classes.
2. Private browsing.(I know it can be done in Chromium, but haven't tried.)

Try this
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hehijbfgiekmjfkfjpbkbammjbdenadd

Gallahhad
March 26th, 2010, 05:20 AM
Firefox isn't really that good anymore. Sure, it has lots of good features and great website compatibility, but its future is beginning to look poor.

Examples...

-Safari takes about 1 second to load on Snow Leopard for me during its first run. Firefox takes 5-10.

-It's much slower. Much. Even without addons.

-It crashes often in Karmic. WAY too much. 3.5 was a disaster when it first came out too, with frequent crashes.

-What ever happened to speed? Not only startup speed, but Firefox is notably slower than Chrome, Safari and other browsers. I'd even go as far as to say that IE8 is faster by now. I'm not talking with addons either; I mean vanilla Firefox.

Safari is not the future, though I think Chrome might be.

uRock
March 26th, 2010, 05:45 AM
Try this
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/hehijbfgiekmjfkfjpbkbammjbdenadd

It says it is for Windows only. Have you been able to get it to work on Ubuntu?

Khakilang
March 26th, 2010, 06:14 AM
So far no problem with my Firefox but I may use Opera as a back up just in case.

Paqman
March 26th, 2010, 09:17 AM
I always thought Firefox ran just fine. Then I used Chrome and I didn't have as many slowdowns. Plus, when a tab crashed, only that one tab crashed and not everything. In comparison, Firefox's future looks bleak.

+1 to this. Firefox is looking pretty old and creaky these days. I keep it on board as a backup only.

rottentree
March 26th, 2010, 11:31 AM
+1 to this. Firefox is looking pretty old and creaky these days. I keep it on board as a backup only.

Though I heard they are working to remedy this by copying some of chrome's features like the separate process per tab and they also strive to adopt a quicker more continuous update schedule.

iRiUX
March 26th, 2010, 12:21 PM
Firefox isn't really that good anymore. Sure, it has lots of good features and great website compatibility, but its future is beginning to look poor.

Examples...

-Safari takes about 1 second to load on Snow Leopard for me during its first run. Firefox takes 5-10.

-It's much slower. Much. Even without addons.

-It crashes often in Karmic. WAY too much. 3.5 was a disaster when it first came out too, with frequent crashes.

-What ever happened to speed? Not only startup speed, but Firefox is notably slower than Chrome, Safari and other browsers. I'd even go as far as to say that IE8 is faster by now. I'm not talking with addons either; I mean vanilla Firefox.
Firefox is **** on linux OS'. I don't use it anymore as main browser. Just in case someone uses the fast PC as an excuse, I have a very fast laptop... its still ****... regardless of what you run it.

_h_
March 26th, 2010, 01:16 PM
Been using Firefox for a few years now, when I was on Windows and now on Ubuntu.

No problems at all, and it only crashed when I forced it to.

mkvnmtr
March 26th, 2010, 01:51 PM
For me it comes down to a choice between speed or security and privacy. Nothing beats Noscript, add blocker and ghostery on Firefow for security and privacy. Tor works great with tor button. For the sppd gain I get on chromium I have the browser making 20 or so attempts to contact a outside server on start up. Opera does the same. When I want speed I know which to use. When I want security or privacy I know which to use. The idea of using an internet explorer or safari seems like sort of a joke to me.

Duncan J Murray
March 26th, 2010, 03:04 PM
on my thinkpad T40, I found firefox was pretty fast, admittedly not as quick as chromium.

However, I've finally switched over after giving chrome 3 goes. For some reason the awesome bar slowed down massively, and started missing keypresses, making it very frustrating to use.

Chrome gives me more screen estate , it's a bit snappier, and I think also more reliable.

Dunc

Psumi
March 26th, 2010, 03:31 PM
Chrome takes up 110% of my 1.60 GHz Pentium M Processor (No logical cores, single-core.) (With Flash)

Don't tell me it's faster.

uRock
March 26th, 2010, 03:41 PM
Chrome takes up 110% of my 1.60 GHz Pentium M Processor (No logical cores, single-core.) (With Flash)

Don't tell me it's faster.

It's faster. Did you try reinstalling. Definitely sounds like something went wrong.

NightwishFan
March 26th, 2010, 03:41 PM
Chrome = Webkit?

xpod
March 26th, 2010, 05:09 PM
Chrome takes up 110% of my 1.60 GHz Pentium M Processor (No logical cores, single-core.) (With Flash)

Don't tell me it's faster.

It`s faster, for me anyway, not just on my Dual Core Desktop with it`s couple of Gig of memory but also on three laptops, which are similar spec to yours, and 2 Atom powered Netbooks.

I`ve actually been using Firefox for most of the time i`ve used a computer but i`ve been using Chrome/ium on the laptop/s in recent months and on my Desktop in recent weeks.
It was initially because of speed on the older laptops i switched over but the reality is that browser opening times are neither here nor there once your browser is open and the Screen Estate argument i`ve seen mentioned is no big deal when you can easily hit F11 in both browsers to get a full screens worth of screen estate. I do like the Chrome search/address bar in one but i believe that can easily be recreated in Firefox so i`m not entirely sure why i`ve stopped using FF but thats what i`ve done. It`s still installed on the Desktop but it`s removed on the laptops.

Talking about page loading speeds i came across this page loading test (http://stevesouders.com/hpws/max-connections.php) site on another forum i frequent and according to that Chrome seems to be an average of over two times faster at carrying out the task in hand, on my desktop anyway.

Firefox......Page load time 14661 ms
Chrome.......Page load time 6550 ms

EDIT: The best thing i`ve found for increasing page loading times, regardless of browser, is switching from my ISP provided DNS. :-)

madnessjack
March 26th, 2010, 05:31 PM
Chrome takes up 110% of my 1.60 GHz Pentium M Processor (No logical cores, single-core.) (With Flash)

Don't tell me it's faster.
Doing what??! :P

Uncle Spellbinder
March 26th, 2010, 06:19 PM
I'm finding this with every computer that I have seen Firefox running on. That's 5 different machines.

Hmmmm. I'm not finding any of that on 7 machines. My desktop, my laptop, my wife's desktop and laptop, my work computer and 2 friends' computers. All 7 machines, Firefox 3.6.2 is lightning quick.

dchosenb
March 26th, 2010, 06:32 PM
I've noticed Firefox is significantly slower than Chrome too. I'm pretty sure it's not machine dependent as I regularly use 3 different well maintained and plenty-fast computers, one running Windows XP, one running Karmic, and one dual booting Windows 7 and Lucid. (please don't hate me, the Windows is for the job :p)

I've completely moved my browsing activities from Chrome to Firefox though I do still hold a sense of loyalty and nostalgia toward Firefox and I do launch it every so often to let it update itself and it's plugins and see if things have gotten any better.

macogw
March 26th, 2010, 06:47 PM
lol why on earth would you have 30-60 tabs open? My wife does that with windows and icons and it drives me up a wall.

Only 30-60? I usually have 90-130. In those cases, Firefox uses about 700MB RAM.

ratcheer
March 26th, 2010, 07:20 PM
I am not having problems with Firefox, either. I am currently running 3.6.2 on Karmic with Sun Java and Adobe Flash plugin. Also use the AdBlock Plus, Fire GPG, and NoScript add-ons. I have not had any crashes and it is plenty fast.

I have tried Opera and Chrome, but I almost always use Firefox.

Tim

madnessjack
March 26th, 2010, 07:55 PM
Only 30-60? I usually have 90-130. In those cases, Firefox uses about 700MB RAM.

How?? Seriously- what could you be doing to warrant needing that many tabs open? :P

hessiess
March 26th, 2010, 08:22 PM
Use flashblock.

uRock
March 26th, 2010, 10:47 PM
How?? Seriously- what could you be doing to warrant needing that many tabs open? :P

I open more than that in one session, but not at one time. It still loads all of my RAM.(2GB)