31
votes
The new Firefox is so snappy, even with uBlock Origin enabled!
I just got the newer version of Firefox (v157.0) and I'm amazed at how snappy it is. It feels like Firefox does when you have 0 extensions, except that I have uBO and a few others.
It used to feel so sluggish, pages took 500ms or even 1 second to display anything after typing the address, but no more; they render almost instantly.
A very nice surprise indeed!
If you left Firefox because it was too slow, now's the time to ditch Chrom{e,ium} and reign Google's chokehold on standards and utter contempt for privacy in!
Maybe it's just because I spent my childhood on dialup, but I never found firefox to be painfully slow.
Like, I've been using Firefox and Chrome side by side for years, and the only time I can tell a significant difference is if it's a garbage website sending down JavaScript rabbitholes because a "feature" wasn't "supported". 80% the time, switching the useragent to chrome fixes that.
I find the bubbles annoying, but I've given up hope on ever having a stable UI again.
Same here. People have been talking about how slow Firefox is ever since Chrome came out, but I've never experienced it. Maybe it's because I'm even slower than Firefox, so I don't notice it. I don't know.
If you mean the new tab bar, you can disable that in about:config by setting
browser.nova.enabledtofalse.Thanks, I've been too lazy to figure how to undo the bubbles, but that's one of the few things I dislike about FF: implementation of crap I don't like... but I can still go in and change it back at least. >3
To me the latest Firefox is just a slightly more round and purple version that made my tree style tabs get irritatingly large.
Maybe it’s just that I am not going down a million different sketchy websites or something anymore, but I’d kind of got the idea that people who think that Firefox is slow are people who never actually use it. Firefox hasn’t really been slow for a long time now and I haven’t had any noticeable problems with it outside of the ones I would expect from the ones I get from the privacy protection extensions I have. When was the last time you used Firefox?
Before today? Yesterday. It's been my main browser for a decade.
Same here, though definitely over a decade. Likely closer to almost two now. Which may also explain why I get crotchety anytime there's an update and I want to swap things back to how they were before...
Huh. Maybe owning a Mac has spoiled me then? 🤷
You can set
sidebar.revamptofalseinabout:configto get rid of the latest changes to sidebarFeels about the same to me, with a lot more rounded corners. And a few odd misaligned things. The overly round elements and a few of the alignment things I fixed through userChrome and userContent css fixes gist here in case anyone is interested.
You can disable the new theme with an about:config value (
browser.nova.enabled= false), so I've done that for now, but expect that to eventually stop working.Doing this myself, and not looking forward to the day that css becomes mandatory to fix, because that adds an extra layer of per-device hassle. For me its about accessibility - I don't want UI elements to become smaller for some stylized reason as I don't need help with my already high misclick rate.
FWIW there's a UI density setting now (in "Appearance" if I recall correctly) where you can choose between "compact" and two other options that are slightly more spacious. Not a huge difference between any of them but it could still help a bit!
oh great! Thank you! I want my browser to be as plain and boring as possible, actually same goes for my OS and any program or app I'm using. If everything could look as plain as Windows NT 4.0 I would be in heaven.
Thanks! There's still way too much padding in some things but this helps a lot
Yeah I didn't mess too much with it, trying to keep it easy enough to maintain.
I feel you, my userChrome is a gigantic pain in the ass nearly every single update
I'm so glad somebody else thinks that too - the fact that they didn't list anything about perf in the release notes had me questioning whether I was imagining it. I don't see anything in the uBlock Origin changelog recently about performance either
I’ve used Firefox through thick and thin since around version 3.0. It was super snappy compared to the competition at the time. Then I recall how Chrome showed up and started the JS rendering race.
This version does somewhat remind me of the old days of Firefox, but I do miss the standard orange that’s been supplanted by purple over the years. The speed is in fact noticeable. Can anyone test to see how much faster it is these days?
Firefox hasn't been slow for me for years. Things load near-instantly and have for many years now, and it's been long enough that I can't even remember that far back to when it felt slow for me. And I have used it on Windows, Mac, and Linux, including "slow/older" (raspberry pi chips, 3rd gen intel core CPU chips for instance) Linux boxes without a problem.
That said I prefer to put some distance between me and Mozilla (due to plenty of missteps on their part, a wrongly AI-leaning focus, among many other reasons I do not trust them to directly be the steward of my browsing experience) and I use a fork (Waterfox) now instead, but up until maybe a year ago, I used Firefox for decades. There was a point maybe 5-10 years ago when it felt like it had gotten slightly more sluggish than its competitors, but Mozilla solved that problem quite early on IMHO.
Now, I'm not discounting your experience with Firefox having been really slow and a new version somehow fixing whatever was wrong- but I will say that I don't even think that's a common experience with Firefox in recent years so maybe something deeper was wrong.
I'm glad that whatever they've done has further optimized the speed, however.
I just updated (I was about 8 or 9 versions behind and the browser checks were getting annoying) and it definitely feels faster. Had to update some userChrome but surprisingly little given how far I updated.