I have always been a big fan of Mozilla Firefox - y’know, the world’s most used browser, yadda-yadda. But it looks like lately the thing is getting slower and slower, almost worse after each update.
I tried the version 4 - little did I know I was about to embark for one of the most horrible rides. If 3.x was slow, 4 is a snail on anti-depressants: happy as hell but not going anywhere.
Having said this, I am only using ONE add-on, namely Firefox Sync. Which I deactivate sometimes, with little or no effect on the overall speed of the browser. It has gotten to the point where I’m typing (this post for instance) and the text in the box is showing up 5-10 seconds after I’m done writing the sentence. (I’m a fast touch typer but that’s no excuse.)
Also, this is happening on four different generations of Macs - a Macbook, a MB Air, a 2008 iMac and a 2010 iMac. No, five if I count the MacMini acting as a server.
So anyone is experiencing the same? And if yes, what was your way of dealing with the problem? Changing browsers, tweaking the FF, reinstalling… anything?
(Please don’t bash the OS or the browsers. Everyone has their own reasons for using this or that thing. Thanks.)
/andy
Yes, other people have noticed this too. You need to understand a bit about the (recent) history of Firefox. (I’m going to ignore for now the earlier history as it’s not relevant to your question.) There was once a project called Mozilla, which included not only a web browser but also an e-mail client, news reader, and HTML editor. Some of the folks developing Mozilla thought the project should focus on just a small, fast, lean web browser, whereas others thought that the integrated system was fine the way it was. The former camp took the browser codebase from Mozilla and turned it into Firefox. The latter camp continued to use the integrated codebase and turned it into SeaMonkey. Both camps continued to collaborate on the core codebase (HTML rendering, etc.).
After several years of development, however, the Firefox folks evidently lost sight of the “small, fast, lean” bit of its goal, and the browser has become a big, bloated memory hog. Meanwhile, SeaMonkey has remained more or less the same as Mozilla in terms of resource consumption. The fact that it’s got an e-mail client and HTML editor integrated don’t significantly add to its memory footprint, and certainly don’t take up any extra processing power when they’re not being used.
So if you are looking for a web browser which behaves more or less the same as Firefox but doesn’t have the resource issues, give SeaMonkey a try. It renders web pages pretty much exactly the same (as it uses the same engine) and most of the extensions and plugins are compatible.
psychonaut: You should get some sort of reward for that post. That was great!
I am not arguing with others that say Firefox has become slower (I’m guessing that it might be more noticeable if you do a lot more surfing to a lot more different places than I do), just making an observation - I haven’t noticed any significant slowing down as Firefox has been updated (I am on FF 4.0.1).
I noticed the same thing starting with Firefox 3.6. It’s significantly slower, especially at launch. I gave up and switched to Chrome, but I think I’ll give SeaMonkey a try. I do miss AdBlock, but not enough to tolerate Firefox’s pokey pace.
The next question is why has Firefox gotten so bloated? What have they added and why?
I notice more and more quirks with FF4. The memory leak is much worse. I have a work-around for that. Some pages just won’t load. They show a blank page. It can just plain lock up. I’m staying with it because they must address these problems eventually. No single browser does everything right.
I’m trying SeaMonkey as we speak (pun intended) and credit must be given to psychonaut for a very useful piece of advice. Of course an hour of browsing isn’t really benchmark but it’s as fast as FF used to be in the good old days WITH Sync enabled and everything else I was working on before installing, open on the desktop (two pages of Flash heavy content, two gmail accounts, my work website, one or two youtubes open / paused and FB logged in), in a menagerie of tab/window combinations.
Moreover, I was able to flawlessly import all the bookmarks with the Sync function from the existing account I previously set up in FF. Neat!
If this fares well I’ll change everything at work (6 machines) plus the other five I’ve got at home. I may or may not update on the results but for the time being, thanks psychonaut!
(LE: iStatPro doesn’t seem to cough at all, unlike while using FF, when all the RAM / CPU bars were peaked in blue.)
I’ve always wondered this myself (but not too much, since I’ve been using SeaMonkey, rather than Firefox, since their split from Mozilla). From what I read about Firefox on sites like Slashdot, a large part of the slowness is (or was) memory leaks, so it’s not all intentional bloat. I understand that in the last year or so they’ve got much of the memory leakage under control, but Firefox is still slower than SeaMonkey.
How long are you willing to wait for “eventually”? I don’t have much experience reporting bugs to Firefox, but I do find the SeaMonkey developers to be amazingly responsive. For example, late last year I reported a bug in how SeaMonkey handles subscriptions to RSS feeds. Within two days a patch was submitted, which made it into the next scheduled official release in March.
With the move to FF4 they have added hardware acceleration, from all benchmarks I’ve seen it typically dramatically increases FF’s rendering speed and puts it past any browser which does not take advantage of hardware acceleration (in benchmarks that benefit from it.)
However, there’s also a lot of talk on the internet that FF4 hardware acceleration is plain terrible for many hardware configurations; additionally there are other new features aside from hardware acceleration that ideally make the browser run faster or render better but depending on your hardware can do just the opposite. The forums I read about the issue blamed it 100% on Windows and claim IE9 has not had the same issues because Microsoft was able to implement some sort of software workaround.
I’m using FF4 but with hardware acceleration off and I’ve had many flash-enabled tabs open simultaneously without any issues. However when it first came out I tried using hardware acceleration and it totally messed up the font rendering on my machine. After extensive research (which is where I heard some people were having crushing slow down issues) it basically came down to “a large number of video cards are incompatible with FF4 hardware acceleration”) so I had to turn it off.
What is a “memory leak”. FF is killing me these days. It’s so slow, and half the time when I close it, it still keeps some process going that slows everything else down. I’m at the point where I’m starting to “close” that window by going to task manager and ending the process as my SOP. FF was fantastic when I started using it 6 years ago or so, but it’s terrible now.
SeaMonkey might be the answer, although I’m probably going to switch to a Mac before the year’s over.
A memory leak is when a program reserves some of your computer’s memory for its use but doesn’t release its hold when it’s done using the memory. It’s a symptom of poor programming.
Firefox will perform similarly on a Mac. It’s the same program, just compiled for different computers or operating systems. If and when you switch to a Mac, you can still run SeaMonkey, which, like Firefox, is available for all major operating systems (and probably several lesser known ones as well).
What is the cure for “memory leak?”
Proper garbage collection!
For the user, there isn’t any besides killing the program and restarting it when it gets too unwieldy. The only real solution is to program better.
I have long since switched to Chrome and Safari, after many years of being a faithful Firefox user.
Thanks. Sounds like what is happening to me.
Any reason not to use Safari once on a Mac?
if your Mac hasn’t been “refreshed” in a while (rebooted after several weeks of running OR permissions repaired OR PRAM reset) Safari tends to act a bit sluggish too. also from personal observation Safari sometimes acts up when dealing with Flash content (no wonder here, heh.)
other than that it’s good. but to get back to the OQ, I personally don’t want to use Safari because so far I couldn’t sync my bookmarks among 6+ machines AND iphone AND ipad (the latter two could have been synced with ONE machine through MobileMe but that alone wasn’t worth paying Stevie J. $99/yr.) maybe with the new icloud things are changing. we shall see.
Safari is (in part) proprietary software, which means you’re beholden to Apple for updates, bug fixes, new features, and all other development. If you find that Apple isn’t fixing bugs fast enough, or that it’s deliberately crippling its browser with DRM or spyware or some other components which violate your privacy or your freedoms, or that it stops publishing the browser altogether, then you’re out of luck. Firefox and SeaMonkey (and many other browsers) are Free Software, which means that the freedom to use and modify the software belongs to everyone in perpetuity. Anyone can modify the software to fix a bug or add a new feature (or ask/pay someone else to do the same, if they’re not a programmer), and no one can ever place restrictions on people’s use of the software now or in the future.