FireFox Really Slow

NoNRG

2[H]4U
Joined
Dec 16, 2007
Messages
2,124
Recently has anyone been experiencing extreme slowness when using Firefox? It's been so bad and, with the number of tabs I keep open (20-30), it's been consuming ~3GB of memory regularly. I keep FireFox on auto-update, so assume this is with the latest versions over the last couple months.

I finally made the transition to Opera on all of my computers and it's been much better.

Not sure if this is the right sub-section for this.
 
It's been bad since v53, I've had a ton of issues after having zero issues for years. Don't want to switch to Chrome and won't use IE so I'm just stuck with it for now.
 
Thanks. Good to know others are experiencing the same thing. I'd definitely prefer to stay with Firefox, but it's been affecting my productivity.

Opera is a branch of Chrome right?
 
used FF since version 3 never an issue i can think of for much if anything beside the bug here and there that wasnt fixed in the later versions new version seems faster and better to me that just came out :)
 
I stopped using FF after the latest forced update rendered it useless. I would uninstall it, reinstall it and I would get no screen. Uninstall it, reinstall the older version and viola, works. Then it does it's forced update and again blackness. I got fedup and just removed it. Using chrome without any issues.
 
No issues here with Firefox ESR 52.2.0 portable + 27 addons/extensions + user scripts all used with alarming regularity, haven't noticed anything weird or strange, still loads up in a few seconds but really I never close the damned browser to be honest. My laptop now has 114 days and 21 hours uptime, go figure, and it never goes into standby nor do I use hibernate either so that means it's been on for 114 days 21 hours and some odd minutes, Firefox ESR is showing 1.6GB of RAM usage which is meaningless overall considering.
 
God damn...20-30 tabs? I can't remember what I have opened after 10 tabs. I'm still on FF and they just released a less memory hog version a few days ago. I manually updated it to v.54 (64-bit) and it seems good so far.
 
God damn...20-30 tabs? I can't remember what I have opened after 10 tabs. I'm still on FF and they just released a less memory hog version a few days ago. I manually updated it to v.54 (64-bit) and it seems good so far.

I thought I'd be at the low end of total tabs open compared to everyone here, lol.
 
FF Portable here updated for like 6 to 8 years to 54.0 at the moment with 7 or 8 add-ons or extensions or whatever they want to call them at the moment.

Never really had an issue with Firefox. I am going to assume all the problems I hear from people is actually from their host OS and not Firefox.

I have it installed on my quad boot rig that consists of Win 7, Win 8.1, Win 10 and CentOS( this version isn't the portable one) and I have it installed on my 2008 WinServer also.

No issues for years and years and I keep them patched. I admit a few add-ons have gimped out, but they usually get updated in a few hours and return to normal.

Time to hit up that event viewer and discover your real issues.
 
Thanks for the additional comments everyone.

Time to hit up that event viewer and discover your real issues.

Yeah, that may help. This slowness has shown up across two desktops running Windows 10 and one laptop running Windows 7. It's not a single computer that I'm experiencing this problem with.

I use Lastpass, uBlock Origin, and HTTPS Everywhere as addons on all of the setups. Maybe Lastpass has gone to shit since they got bought and it's causing my issues.
 
Thanks for the additional comments everyone.



Yeah, that may help. This slowness has shown up across two desktops running Windows 10 and one laptop running Windows 7. It's not a single computer that I'm experiencing this problem with.

I use Lastpass, uBlock Origin, and HTTPS Everywhere as addons on all of the setups. Maybe Lastpass has gone to shit since they got bought and it's causing my issues.
That is not many at all....I use Https Everywhere also but I use Block Site and Ghostery and Decentraleyes and FoxyProxy.

Also note that SOME websites will stall you out on the page load if your browser doesn't respond to the ad servers first. I know Windows 10 has automagical shit going on in the background that watches this shit so there is probably some weirdness going on there too.
 
Hello,

Windows 7 user here, on a gamer rig. Firefox hangs on and crashes every time my mate is browsing tumblr for an extended period of time. About:Healthreport shows nothing wrong and no crashes whatsoever, which is a blatant lie.

I run a shitload of add-ons, disabled them all and re-enabled them one by one, stretching the test period on over a week : extensions are definitely not the problem. I usually keep a shitload of tabs open (20-70) on two or three different windows. I made my best to change my habits and to keep not more than 10/15 tabs open in a single window for a while, it did not change a thing.

I installed Comodo Dragon' security orientated browser for my mate (based on Chrome minus Google's crap), I kept my extensions and my bad habits... Firefox is still slow but doesn't hang on or crashes any longer and my mate is in Tumblr's heaven : never ending pages are loading faster than ever with modified Chrome and it did not crash once.

Well, it works and everyone is feeling good, but I miss the good old time when Firefox was the best and forced updates did not exist.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: NoNRG
like this
So, hit the Start button and type the word reliability and then when it appears on the list select it and look at the Windows 7 Reliability history and find out what's going on with that system.

I hear people talk about Firefox "crashing all the time" and yet when I ask most folks to look at their reliability history nothing shows up which of course means Firefox isn't actually crashing but there's something else going on. Been using this browser since before day one and on hundreds if not thousands of different machines with crazy hardware configs of all kinds, different OSes (Windows, OSX/macOS, and dozens upon dozens of different Linux distros) and I swear I don't have those issues.

In fact my current Firefox portable install has been in the same folder for 7 years now and just updated with newer versions as required when they come out up till Firefox 38 came out and that's when I switched to using the ESR branch which is released every 7 major versions of the regular Firefox. I cannot ever recall a time where Firefox as I've been using it has the much maligned memory leaks (I run mine from a RAMdisk so I'd notice it if that happened), excessive RAM usage (that depends on the end user most of the time and of course badly coded addons/extensions as well as shitty website coding too but it's not directly the fault of the browser itself), slow performance (it works fine for me, I don't care about 50ms here and there and it's proven itself to be almost as fast or even faster than Chrome in Sunspider and some other Javascript benchmarks), and so on.

I guess some folks just have no luck whatsoever with some programs, I honestly don't know. :D

And what is this crap with 'forced updates' supposed to mean, never heard of such a thing myself but then again since I'm using the ESR branch that's a no-no anyway. If people mean how newer versions change so much in terms of the UI well, that's a given, they're always going to change shit in that respect and will keep going till it literally is ChromeFox or something you can't literally tell apart from Chrome I guess.

Baffling stuff to me. :)
 
No issues with FF here. Not sure why some of you guys need so many tabs open. Either you never use them or checking them must take all day!
 
I only run a few tabs at once and noticed no difference, better or worse, going from 53 to 54.

One way to really turbo charge FF is to run that CPU tool in the OS forum. It makes the Firefox UI much faster.
 
Don't recall which version I am running on, but it certainly has been very slow as of late. Chrome loads certain sites a lot quicker. And is just snappier in general. Last time I checked there were no updated for FF... I really prefer the GUI and look, and the plugins I've been using for a while (only a few) but it has been getting to the point I may switch to Chrome even if temporarily for day to day use.
 
  • Like
Reactions: NoNRG
like this
God damn...20-30 tabs? I can't remember what I have opened after 10 tabs. I'm still on FF and they just released a less memory hog version a few days ago. I manually updated it to v.54 (64-bit) and it seems good so far.

Yea, I wind up with score of tabs and a bloated memory footprint, but then I just close it and open it up again.

You guys might try Pale Moon or Waterfox, I think they are better with memory than plain FF.

Maxthon is the only chrome clone I like, but they sell your data, so I don't use it.
 
  • Like
Reactions: blkt
like this
God damn...20-30 tabs? I can't remember what I have opened after 10 tabs (...)

It's actually much easier when there are more then 10 open tabs at once, when the row gets filled and stretches as far as the down arrow on the far right side is made available for you to take a quick glance at all your open tabs, so you don't have to remember anything and you can simply navigate back and forth on all open pages at ease.

I can hardly speak for other tab-maniacs but for me to keep a few dozens open tabs at once is just a more convenient way than the history panel to retrieve the information I once had at my fingertips but would have most certainly lost after I closed that particular tab with a useful piece of information.

Let's say I want to buy some new hardware, I'll start my researches with Google and DuckDuckGo for specs, benchmarking, reviews and pictures. I will keep the most relevant results open in new tabs to be able to check back on them later on for deeper analysis. Once ready to buy I will check for prices on several major online shops and will narrow down my search to the best offers, which will include my favorite non-mainstream shops, often very far out of the beaten path. And here I am with 20/40 tabs open in several windows, with a quite comprehensive mass of information at immediate reach. If not ready yet for my purchase I can save my open tabs with SessionManager and make up my mind on some other day.

When browsing start to be hectic I just do as Hedron : I save my session and restart Firefox. SessionManager gives me the chance to hand pick the tabs I don't need to check back and to get a rid of them. None of the tabs will load until I visit them so I can start fresh with a hundred tabs open at once if I wish, no slow down whatsoever.
 
With FF 52.2.0 ESR the speed has been ridiculously slow since the latest update. 10 add-ons, 1 plugin. Seems the Linux version has all hardware acceleration "disabled by platform". I've got the nvidia drivers installed, so not such FF's problem. Even opening Google homepage is 20+ sec delay due to browser hanging. It's practically unusable.
 
  • Like
Reactions: NoNRG
like this
I was using Chrome but it kept jumping up on memory and disc usage in ways that make no sense. So I tried Firefox for awhile and even Safari, Hell I even tried Edge, Then I found Opera and was using it regularly and then... a Chinese company bought them out and my trust level tanked especially with opera's development team jumping ship. However, I found out where they went and am now using that. https://vivaldi.com/?lang=en_US Vivaldi. Check it out see if you like it.
 
FF has been slower than normal to open for me lately too.
I run AdBlock+ and Ghostery and that seems to be part of it with the latest FF versions.

Just saw that article that FF has figured out how to do massive speed improvements, so we'll see what happens.

.
 
I noticed on Creators Update (1703) that Firefox doesn't seem to run right. I get black screens and websites that lock up, specifically when scrolling. I created new FF profile and it still happened. I rolled back to 1607 (I love FF that much) and the problem went away.

I know they are currently working out some hardware acceleration bugs in FF (with Nvidia), so YMMV on FF experience until then.
 
FF has been slower than normal to open for me lately too.
I run AdBlock+ and Ghostery and that seems to be part of it with the latest FF versions.
Just saw that article that FF has figured out how to do massive speed improvements, so we'll see what happens..

I procrastinated on fixing my install of FF until the weekend, as I use Opera as my backup browser.
3 things to check are:

1) go the "about:support" page and confirm that firefox is running with multiple processes enabled. some addons / plugins are not compatible with it and will force the browser to disable it. the line to check is "Multiprocess Windows". it should read "1/1 (Enabled by default)".
if it says "disabled" - you will need to review your installed addons / plugins and disable any that aren't compatible with this feature. I use about 7 or 8 plugins total and had to do a quick bit of trial and error for 5 minutes, disabling the plugins, then restarting Firefox, checking that page and confirming which ones caused it to be disabled.

2) review the page "about: performance". - remove the space between the : and the "P"
It lists your installed add-ons and will highlight any that are causing slow browser performance. normally it should read "<Add-on Name> currently performs well" for each installed add-on. If it highlights one and says it's causing slow performance, you need to consider disabling it or finding an alternative.
You can also use this page to review the performance of currently open web pages.

3) the "about:config" page can be used to make direct changes to Firefox configuration settings.
The main one to point out here is "dom.ipc.processCount". it is an integer value that can be used to increase the default number of processes Firefox uses. you can use the search box to find it and I suggest reading the support documentation on it, if you want it explained in detail.

Chances are though that reviewing points 1 and 2 should improve things.
 
Last edited:
I've been a die hard Firefox user for years but lately I'm really considering ditching it. Mainly what kept me was customization and extensions, which seem ample now on Chrome. I use multiple portable browsers for different things so I can run them localized and sometimes simultaneously if I need to and prefer Chrome as it's miles faster, Firefox feels like a sluggish boar even using a tweaked fasterfox in a ramdisk. But my main browser with all my fav extensions and bookmarks, etc is Firefox. Maybe I'll try the nightly build. If it's that much better though, it makes me wonder why they aren't implementing it in the regular version.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: NoNRG
like this
I usually have anywhere from 5-15 browser windows open, with several tabs open in each (so possibly 100-150 total tabs open). I've noticed that on my 16 GB laptop, whenever the firefox.exe process grows to about 2 GB memory usage, that's when it becomes very slow and sometimes just shows a black background when I try to open a new tab or window. That's when I have to kill firefox.exe and relaunch and restore all the windows/tabs.
 
I've been using FF since the beta days. I've also noticed slowness, but about every month or so, I run a utility called Speedyfox that restores FF back to like a fresh install.
https://www.crystalidea.com/speedyfox

Mentioned programs start working much more slowly with the lapse of time. The reason is fragmentation of profile databases. SpeedyFox is specially designed to resolve this problem. The method used in SpeedyFox is 100% safe for your profile (e.g. bookmarks, passwords, etc), it's well documented and has been tested on millions of computers.

screen.png
 
I've been using FF since the beta days. I've also noticed slowness, but about every month or so, I run a utility called Speedyfox that restores FF back to like a fresh install.
https://www.crystalidea.com/speedyfox

That's a bit like the vacuumplaces addon. You can set it to autoclean every x amount of starts. It helps a bit. Pretty cool that software works for lots of browsers though.

I'm not a scripter other than little things I can write in linux or windows bat so I don't know if Chrome is written more efficiently or whatever, what I do know is multicore support in the commerical version of Firefox is crap. Even with multi-process function enabled which helps a little bit, it pretty much seems to never use more than as much as 2 threads at most while Chrome will happily use them all when it needs to. At my quick glance of the Nightly Firefox they appear to be finally getting their act together. Don't know how long that's been going on, been a while since I've used the nightly version. I'll have to play with it more later and decide if I want to go that route or chrome as my designated home browser. Multicore chips have existed for more than a decade now, there's no excuse at all for a main contender browser to still only be using 1-2 cores.
 
Last edited:
Before I like and use only Firefox but finally I got the issue about to use Firefox then I start using Chrome. Chrome its too good from Firefox. Still, I'm using Chrome without any issue. My opinion Chrome is the good from Firefox.
 
A week or so ago I got a new updated version, and it seems much faster. Before the update I did think it was slow.
 
Back
Top