This can’t be just me, right? Every now and then I’ll have a few tabs open on Firefox, and I’ll try switching between them, and Firefox will take its own sweet time in reloading one that I’ve already loaded. It seems to me that this shouldn’t be.
Firefox is heavily optimized, and by heavily I mean bloated and overweight.
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Each page is a separate process, so that if it dies, it doesn’t kill the whole mess.
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Each page is paused when it looses focus, so that your computer isn’t wasting time showing streaming advertisements on the hidden pages.
The fundamental problem is that the modern web is so bloated and overweight, but FF hasn’t been able to handle this a well as other browsers. Something you can try is using an ad blocker – that might help pages reload faster.
Firefox chews up CPU cycles like no other browser. I can have Edge, Chrome, and some other program open all at the same time, and it still doesn’t equal what Firefox often ends up being.
If your computer is low on RAM then Windows may be swapping out that tab’s data to hard disk. Browsers use a lot of RAM, surprisingly much. How much memory does your computer have, and how much is free? You can see this in the Resource Monitor app included with Windows, under the Memory tab.
Also, depending on browser and site cache settings, Firefox may be requesting elements of the page or the entire page again from the Internet. The speed of that depends on many things including your CPU, network congestion, Internet speed, and the speed and response times of every server those page elements are loaded from.
So yeah things get slow, but it’s also quite amazing how much happens behind the scenes to make it all possible.