I love Firefox but some JS heavy demos etc. just don't work fast enough. I hate that I know exactly why. It's because they were only ever tested on Chrome during development.
Webdev here, chrome was a breath of fresh air in the IE era, there was nothing close for dev tools. But after Firefox rewrote their rendering engine I switched to it as my personal browser, that plus the UI rewrite plus the immensely better privacy features made it more and more comfortable for personal browsing. Then I noticed the dev tools at some point had also been considerably upgraded to the point that for most work it pretty much has feature parity - so here's my anecdote, the tables have turned and I develop in Firefox, then test in chrome.
One of the main things i've noticed is a very jagged divide in performance. Firefox's renderer is generally faster and has fewer bugs, but with some APIs like canvas it's a mixed bag, some things are very slow due to significant implementation differences such as fillText. Even for the JS engine it's not so clear cut, everyone thinks of V8 as the king, but there are some cases that chromes optimizer is extremely sensitive to such as global variables.
Unfortunately, this seems like another example of FireFox optimizing for the wrong thing.
To the casual user, FireFox seems "slow" because it takes 30 seconds to start up when you click its icon. Chrome takes under 5 seconds, and is thus "fast".
Nobody but you and me care about how fast our javascript runs. The FF team is trying to please us, while ignoring the 99% of users who'd prefer to just be able to check their Facebook in the morning without waiting forever.
I really really want to use Firefox but I am still annoyed by the relative slowness compared to Chrome.
For me it is noticeable slower both when it comes to basic functionality such as opening new tabs, but also when it comes to the dev tools. When I want to use the dev tools I launch Chrome and use it from there just because I know it will be a more pleasant experience.
I get where everyone is coming from when they say Firefox is getting better, but I really don't see Chrome getting worse and I certainly don't see Firefox surpassing Chrome.
Firefox dev tools in Nightly are much better, but still don't beat Chrome's. Firefox is still ugly. Firefox still won't let me open Nightly and Aurora. Firefox's Javascript performance is getting faster and memory usage is getting better, but when running tight loops in Javascript doing lots of calculations (specifically rendering fractal flames) Firefox becomes unresponsive and unusable, where as Chrome is fine and I can still browse normally while it runs in the background. Chrome might use a but more RAM but that's not a problem for me. I have buckets of RAM. Firefox needs restarting all the time when I change extensions or get updates.
Firefox has so many great features and yet I find myself not using it as my main browser for a simple reason: New windows open twice as fast in Safari and Chrome.
I'm opening a lot of windows because I'm not a fan of tabs. So Firefox feels extremely sluggish to me even though the actual rendering and JavaScript execution is anything but sluggish.
I'm not even sure if Firefox windows open so slowly for a reason or if it's just a really badly designed animation.
Firefox? Faster? Tell that to my browser which gets sluggish whenever I have large or complex pages open. Tell that to my browser which slows to a crawl when flash or HTML5 video is loaded. Tell that to my browser which slows every other tab to a crawl when one is slow. Tell that to my browser which allows a single tab to crash the entire show.
There's a reason why I keep going back to Chrome after trying each version of Firefox for a week or two, and it's all related to basic user experience: performance and stability.
its great that they have improved compared to themselves, but i think the question is, is it vastly faster than chrome?
think of it this way, why would i switch to firefox to get back to where i was to begin with (speed wise)? firefox would have to be substantially different from chrome to make people make the effort to switch. right now it seems that it is just catching up to the competition. i look forward to the continued updates and will continue to look into the possibility of switching in the future. right now, the speed is comparable to chrome, and extensions seem to be at a disadvantage. a few more months to go for me, personally before trying again.
Everybody said it was faster. So I did countless benchmarks with a stop watch for the pages that I frequent and for every single one of them Firefox rendered the pages faster.
Big fan of mozilla and firefox. I've been defending it for years, but now I'm having a hard time. It's slower in almost any case than the competition, from initial rendering to switching tabs. Some stuff hang the page completly. Watching too many videos or scrolling too much twitter slow down the browser to a crawl even after closing all tabs and require a restart.
I'm not using firefox out of sheer ideology and support for the FOSS community, but it's not the superior product I used to sell to everybody.
I have a theory why people have dissenting views on the performance of Firefox. I have a laptop dedicated to doing business online. Firefox has no addons on that machine. Some websites are painfully slow and my laptop fans kick on. I have debugged these issues and in every case it was javascript bogging down the CPU's, all 8 cores! gaming laptop I am not a web developer, so it is perhaps unfair for me to pick on the quality of the javascript.
Disable javascript and well... the site isn't usable any more for business transactions, but the slowness and CPU load vanishes. The website becomes snappy, highly responsive and easy to browse. The fans spin down and memory usage goes way down.
I've never used Chrome. Does chrome not ever get bogged down by javascript? Do they have a different javascript library/engine? I assume they must. Can you change the javascript libraries used by Firefox and Chrome? Apologies in advance if this is a dumb question.
I've ditched Chrome completely in favor of Firefox (desktop and mobile). I've been surprised about Firefox's speed, but not in a good way... After all the hype I've been seeing about Firefox getting faster I've been disappointed by how sluggish it feels on my system (Linux, 20 CPUs, 32GB RAM -- yes, this is my personal dev machine :D). Chrome is still faster, but I'm sticking to FF because I believe in their mission.
Oh how I wish Mozilla would just slap basic browser chrome on and ship the thing. Firefox used to be a fast browser, nowadays after a couple hours it takes 30s to open a new window on my 32GB machine and 10s to register a link click and start loading the page.
I am in my peer group the last Firefox guy standing, but not for much longer, I fear.
Really? In my experience, JS heavy web apps work better with Firefox. What Chrome does better, though, is letting you switch to another tab or close the tab while a JS (or DOM)-heavy app is taxing your CPU.
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