Have you tried making sure your Graphics driver is up to date? That could be causing this issue. Upgrade your graphics drivers to use hardware acceleration and WebGL

one would assume that if i went through the trouble of a fresh OS install, i would have also installed the latest graphics driver.

But thank for the reply. I was honestly waiting for someone to inform me that i needed to remove extensions, or replace my profile, as that's the normal canned response.

Let's face it, with Mozilla continuously adding unnecessary "features" that no one asked for, wanted, and very few actually use, as well as the constant "upgrades" in the UI that serve absolutely NO function other than to further resemble chrome, and the entire browser relying more and more upon memory as a crutch to support it's single core structure, the entire project has become slow, bloated, and as pointless as IE.

If only Mozilla would remember WHY Firefox became so popular. It wasn't because it was the only competitor to IE, it wasn't. It was because it had a small memory footprint, used little CPU, and did the job. It was light, fast, and wasn't bloated with a million "features" that no one actually needs.

But then the trend of adding bloat began. First it was the integrated search feature... OK, can live with that, it's kind of useful... Then it was the constant UI changes that added to bloat, then it was data tracking, then it was the "contact page" with all your recently bookmarked pages..also tracked... now they are simply compound already existing idiotic alterations with further changes that do little more than add to the bloat, and to top it off, unless you're a *nix user, you can pretty much forget the idea of a 64bit flavor, unless of coarse you want to spend you days fixing and building from source. Even then, you'll spend a year attempting to strip the bloated features that have been spaghetti coded throughout the project.

Forefox has drifted so far away from it's original goals, and ideals, that it might as well have been developed by microsoft, or google.

Do you have a support question?

If not, please provide feedback to Mozilla here: https://input.mozilla.org/en-US/feedback

During the process of entering your question, did the site suggest this article: Firefox is slow after updating to Firefox 38? If not, that has more information on a new issue with certain graphics drivers (as mentioned in earlier replies).

Mozilla's mission is to drive the web forward, which involves continuously introducing new technologies in Firefox. At the same time, developers are constantly working to improve memory efficiency. Firefox doesn't stand still; it can't. (For those that need a somewhat slower pace of change, there is the Extended Support Release version.)

Because the browser's code is open source, others have used it to create products that look more like old versions of Firefox, and/or are compiled for 64-bit systems, etc. You can check those out and decide whether they are more productive for you than the official build.

@the-edmeister Thank you for the typical canned response, i'm glad to see that copy-paste still functions.

Canned responses won't work, as the situation is based upon a fresh install of the OS, and a fresh install of firefox. All drivers on the system are new, and up to date.

I ALWAYS run through the basic troubleshooting list. If i had found a fix for the poor performance, and crappy memory/cpu resource hogging, i would not have posted here.

@jscher2000 Thank you for the link, but i had already tried that, with no joy.

As for the rest of the reply, i have a few observations, and a few questions:

Statement: "Mozilla's mission is to drive the web forward, which involves continuously introducing new technologies in Firefox."

Observation: Changing the GUI to function, and look like Chrome isn't new and innovative. It's simply duplicating someone else's ideas.

Statement: "At the same time, developers are constantly working to improve memory efficiency. "

Observation: Since when? For the past several years, every time FF has "updated" the memory usage has increased. In a few occasions, it has also introduced memory leaks, or attempted to hide, or split off it's own memory usage into secondary threads.. plugin-container while a good idea, is one such example that has been very poorly implemented.

Statement: "Because the browser's code is open source, others have used it to create products that look more like old versions of Firefox, and/or are compiled for 64-bit systems, etc. You can check those out and decide whether they are more productive for you than the official build."

Question: Where would one find these alternatives. Simply googling turns up a myriad of alternate browsers, mostly Chrome results. The very few firefox based builds i have been able to find are pale moon, and waterfox. Others being based upon FF are mostly *nix flavors, or specialized to niche users such as ice cat, and iceweasle for gnu and debian respectively, and wyzo based upon the niche market of media downloads.

I understand that Firefox is open source, and had i the time, funds, and development team to dedicate to creating a standard, basic, no-frills browser using their source, i would have done so already.

My issue isn't with Firefox itself, but Mozilla's ongoing fight to conform Firefox to chrome's UI, while slowly adding bloat, instability, and unnecessary "features" that aren't needed, or requested by users.

I get that Mozilla is attempting to innovate. But adding bloat, and data tracking features, or features that can't be used unless data tracking is enabled is a huge slap in the face of almost everyone who started using firefox because it stood against those very same measures being implemented in other browsers at the time.

The entire reason why firefox became so popular was because it worked, was fast, and didn't use the entire system's cpu and ram. why? because at that time it didn't have all the bells whistles, doodads, door knockers, banana seat, ape-hangar handlebars and a chrome plated kickstand.. Remove all the junk, and the browser would more than likely cut its CPU and Memory usage in half, if not more.

And yes.. this has turned into a feedback session. No, i didn't intend for it to be one. No, i will not create a "feedback" survey.. I've done so several times over the years, and as is typical of mozilla, they simply ignore it and do the opposite.

ArcAiN6 said

Statement: "At the same time, developers are constantly working to improve memory efficiency. "

Observation: Since when?

Since at least 2012 2011: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink