Firefox used to be faster than chrome on my old laptop now is slower. Why ?
I have an 6 years old laptop with windows 8.1 freshly installed and I have both Firefox 50.0.2 and latest chrome and on both the only extension i have installed is ublock origin. Firefox always used to be faster for me even before installing windows, except maybe less faster with flash but i was ok as i rarely used flash sites. But i noticed a couple of months ago firefox started getting slower on my machine and chrome getting faster. Thats why i reinstalled windows to check and still the same. Anyway i love firefox and I have been using it ever since I started using the internet and I am grateful for your awesome browser. I am not complaining or anything I just wanted to let you know that firefox is slower and slower every day. While chrome seems to work faster.
All Replies (3)
Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web Link} by holding down the <Shift>
(Mac=Options) key, and then starting Firefox.
A small dialog should appear. Click Start In Safe Mode (not Refresh).
Is the problem still there?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-slow-how-make-it-faster
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-many-cpu-resources-how-fix
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-hangs-or-not-responding
FredMcD said
Start Firefox in Safe Mode {web Link} by holding down the <Shift>
(Mac=Options) key, and then starting Firefox. A small dialog should appear. Click Start In Safe Mode (not Refresh). Is the problem still there?
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-slow-how-make-it-faster
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-uses-too-many-cpu-resources-how-fix
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-hangs-or-not-responding
It's still not faster than chrome by a lot. I loaded some webpages in firefox safe mode on or off it took 5-10 seconds longer than chrome and its a lot more sluggish than chrome when more tabs are open. Again its not a problem its just something I have noticed lately and wanted to point out to firefox. Anyway its still usable and i can use it normally I just have to wait more for it to load and to keep it down to a few tabs. Thank you for your reply!
You may be talking about websites & open tabs that have a lot of FlashPlayer content that could explain slowness, because Chrome is probably better at handling FlashPlayer content than is Firefox. If so Blocking unecessary FlashPlayer content may help dramatically. (Conversly some site slow down or lock up when Flash & Ads are bloccked)
No idea about the laptop spec, but it could be pretty low if it is 6 years old so that could have a bearing on some of this. I think the laptop I am using at the moment is about 5 years old. As a test of a simple webpage I opened your profile page from this forum
That loads in a little more than a second, or if not cached takes nearer to 3 seconds. It sounds as if you may be taking tens of seconds to load pages which is not good. of course we do not know how many tabs you have open it could be many tens or several hundreds.
Webpages may sometimes load faster in Firefox's safe mode, but if your only extension is Ublock Origin it may actually be expected to load many websites faster with that active as for instance reported by one of Firefox's developer's in this blog
- Asa Dotzler thoughts on web performance and ad blockers
https://asadotzler.com/2016/05/30/thoughts-on-web-performance-and-advertising/ (Includes links to follow up blog and data)
Note you may wish to consider building up data for yourself in Firefox Health Report, or better still also sharing telemetry data