Firefox too heavy?

Soldato
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Several tabs open, watching a YT video and it can grind PC to a halt after 15 mins or so, it's like going back to the mid 90's, is this just me, any tips or tricks?
 
Soldato
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Stanley Hotel, Colorado
Normal if your machine isnt new. I have a requirement for upto 50 browser windows with real time feed and simple graphical output, for that I prefer chrome last I checked but yea even youtube or normal sites can drag. I use a chrome extension that suspends older windows till you wish to use it again, with 6gb memory I need that

There are various browser benchmarks to compare rigs. I can try to find the link if wanted
 
Soldato
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I can tell when I've got 30+ tabs open in FF on my work PC - things gradually get slower and slower. That's on a Core i5 6500 (3.2Ghz), 16GB RAM, MX200 500GB SSD and Radeon R7 240 4GB.
 
Soldato
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I haven't used Firefox for a year or two now. Chrome does everything I need it to and always have 30+ tabs open at the same time.

Currently have three Twitch streams open, amongst a raft of other windows, plus ten other pieces of software running at the same time (work PC - i5 4590).
 
Man of Honour
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I notice sometimes after awhile FF will become slower at responding - when typing a post for instance the gap between pressing one key and the next and those characters being displayed will increase to a noticeable delay of around 50-100ms until I close and re-open the browser. Doesn't seem to matter if its 2-3 tabs or 20-30 tabs and definitely stuff like flash content can cause it to happen quicker.
 
Soldato
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I notice sometimes after awhile FF will become slower at responding - when typing a post for instance the gap between pressing one key and the next and those characters being displayed will increase to a noticeable delay of around 50-100ms until I close and re-open the browser. Doesn't seem to matter if its 2-3 tabs or 20-30 tabs and definitely stuff like flash content can cause it to happen quicker.

Main problem I had with Firefox was non responsive script message at some websites where it freezes up, I got fed up with that and have recently moved to Vivaldi which is ironically far more stable then FF.
 
Soldato
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Adobe Flash causes it to get bogged down and freeze a lot.

I like to stop it auto-starting (Plugins -> Flash -> Ask to activate).

It's amazing how many sites use it for no apparent reason (for tracking I assume).

Did this on an old Macbook recently and turned it from painful to fairly usable again.
 
Associate
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Karazhan
I like to stop it auto-starting (Plugins -> Flash -> Ask to activate).

It's amazing how many sites use it for no apparent reason (for tracking I assume).

Did this on an old Macbook recently and turned it from painful to fairly usable again.

same probs here with firefox more so on my laptop it's always as others have said to do with flash have removed flash temporarily i'm trying the 64 bit version running very smooth. and websites i have main probs with gaming sites wowhead and icy veins don't appear to need it anyway.

will try that tip cheers :)
 
Man of Honour
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Bumping this thread a bit but I've found (somewhat in relation to my post above) that on (4 core) Atom based tablets some tweaking to e10 configuration really makes a difference to Firefox performance - make sure you have a version of Firefox (most recent ones should) that supports e10 (electrolysis) in about:support check that Multiprocess Windows has a number higher than 0 then go to about:config and change:

browser.tabs.remote.autostart : true
browser.tabs.remote.autostart.2 : true
dom.ipc.processCount : 4

Some of these might be redundant now not sure but seems to work best with all 3 set - might find the odd add-on/extension is incompatible as well.

Seems that balanced/tablet power profile and the Atom architecture really doesn't play nice with Firefox especially Firefox maintenance scripts seem to over time cause a lot of stalling on the main browser thread - this does spawn some extra processes and uses about 20% more RAM which might be an issue on 1GB tablets but overall at least for me makes a huge difference. Also seems beneficial though to a lesser extent on desktop systems.
 
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mrk

mrk

Man of Honour
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Never had this issue myself and often have pinned Netflix and Prime Video tabs open when watching stuff on and off, as well as multiple youtube tabs from subscriptions I watch through as and when.

So if the new FF update brings huge gains, things can only get better!

How old is your FF profile, and have you ever cleared the cache/history? I clear it all once a year as it just builds up, out of habit above all else.
 
Man of Honour
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13 Oct 2006
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Another thing to add, FF55 will bring big improvements when you have loads of tabs: http://www.techradar.com/news/firef...uge-numbers-of-tabs-leaves-chrome-in-the-dust

It's already in the beta channel, but should be coming out on the release channel in a couple of days (the 8th this month on the schedule).

Sounds good hope it lives upto the hype - on some systems Firefox can really bite the dust with balanced power profiles, etc. and memory use is kind of out of hand.
 
Soldato
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browser.tabs.remote.autostart : true
browser.tabs.remote.autostart.2 : true
dom.ipc.processCount : 4

Indeed looks as though they are now redundant from here
Setting the value of browser.tabs.remote.autostart to true enables the multi-process architecture in Firefox, setting it to false disables it.
dom.ipc.processCount. - "Mozilla Firefox uses one content process by default right now when multi-process Firefox is enabled. Mozilla plans to change that in Firefox 54 by increasing the number of content processes to 4 in that version."

could not see anything on autostart.2

especially Firefox maintenance scripts
what is a firefox maintenance script ? (crash protection auto-save ? clearing the cache speeds up that, and can increase the period)

to keekp FF lean - personally use 'BarTab Lite X' to esnure tabs on restored sessions are only loaded on demand, and use the unload_tab from context menu if I know a tab is a resource hog.


for chrome
The Great Discarder
0.1.2
Automatically discards unused tabs to free up system resources
does wonders, for me chrome is a speed over resources choice
 
Man of Honour
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13 Oct 2006
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90,805
From looking into - seems they used variants of browser.tabs.remote.autostart naming such as the browser.tabs.remote.autostart.2 I put above on various experimental builds so that people didn't just set it once and forget about it and then reduce the amount of testing/feedback they go. Anything other than browser.tabs.remote.autostart is depreciated but might need to be set if you are on older versions or testing builds, etc.

Interesting about build 54 onwards - my desktops are still on 53 - though my tablet was updated to 54 and was still running on processCount 1 - setting it to 4 has made a huge difference.

Firefox seems to have some background housekeeping scripts or something - after awhile I find the browser periodically slows down a lot while it seems to be running some kind of maintenance tasks to reduce memory usage and clean up resources, etc. after which it returns to full speed for awhile with these changes that doesn't seem to stall out the main browser thread while whatever it is, is ongoing - on desktop/more powerful systems that stuff seems to have minimal inpact but on lower powered devices using balanced power profiles, etc. it seems to have quite an impact.
 

V F

V F

Soldato
Joined
13 Aug 2003
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UK
Never had this issue myself and often have pinned Netflix and Prime Video tabs open when watching stuff on and off, as well as multiple youtube tabs from subscriptions I watch through as and when.

So if the new FF update brings huge gains, things can only get better!

How old is your FF profile, and have you ever cleared the cache/history? I clear it all once a year as it just builds up, out of habit above all else.

How often do you make a new profile?
 
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