54
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!
Ran some benchmarks on an X230 (i5 3rd gen):
FF 156
speedometer: 3.27
jetstream 3: 65.3
motionmark: 456.52 60fps +-7.50%
FF 157
speedometer: 7.16
jetstream 3: 68.49
motionmark 593.57 60fps +- 8.93%
The speedup is quite noticeable
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
Before the engine overhaul in Firefox 57 (Quantum), Firefox was noticeably sluggish, memory leaky and often borderline unusable for a few years. Not to discount Google abusing its search monopoly, but Firefox's bleeding was accelerated by how outright bad it had become in comparison.
Yea, me neither. I think there are/were genuine cases where Google websites are designed to be faster in Chrome but even then: So be it. I don't really think that's the case anymore, though.
I was mostly in the same boat, not understanding what everyone was complaining about, until I changed my home/new-tab page (using the New Tab Override extension) to a self-hosted Linkding instance.
An extremely common workflow for me is to hit ctrl-T to open a new tab followed by an immediate ctrl-L to move focus to the address bar to start typing a url or search terms, but this became almost unusable because Firefox would take just long enough to load New Tab Override and redirect to Linkding that I could hit ctrl-T and ctrl-L and start typing before Firefox finished redirecting the tab. It meant that by the time Firefox finished doing its new tab thing, everything I had started typing in the address bar would get replaced with the Linkding url and I'd have to hit ctrl-L and start typing all over again.
So far though it seems version 157 has fixed this for me... Ctrl-T blasts through the extension and loading Linkding so fast that my natural rhythm for the following ctrl-L doesn't get wiped out by the redirect anymore (I can still do it, but I have to blast them in unnaturally quick succession, so it's not actually an annoying problem anymore).
Other than that one very specific thing though, I've never had a problem with Firefox's speed. The tab style in the latest version doesn't bug me because I've been using vertical tabs since it was available and the changes are a lot less noticeable in that configuration.
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...
I recently used an honest to god windows 98 machine of its era, admittedly on the higher end. My god was it snappy, at least on a clean machine.
Never is bloat more apparent than swapping back to a machine that's 30 years old with a miniscule fraction of the resources and getting a more responsive UI.
Huh. Maybe owning a Mac has spoiled me then? 🤷
I've used it on PC for a long time too and have felt like it's been much smoother and less of a resource hog than Chrome for years too. Computers are weird I guess.
You can set
sidebar.revamptofalseinabout:configto get rid of the latest changes to sidebarI've been a Firefox user since the days it was named Firebird... and before that, I was a Netscape Navigator user.
The thing is that I actually cannot use any Chromium based browsers now because I am physically addicted to mouse gestures and Firefox has the only good implementation. Mouse gesture extensions in Chromium browsers were always a step below Firefox ones and it's gotten worse over time.
This is actually the sole reason why I'll always be a Firefox user (at least, until they break mouse gestures).
Feels 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.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’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'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
Hate to spoil the enthusiasms over the new version.
But: Firefox was until recently an anti-trust insurance policy that Google no longer needs since Orange Man took office. For this reason Mozilla is now an adtech surveillance company.
Note the elegant double-meaning of 'securing user data' in the following quote from Mozilla CEO. First rate public relations work.
Quote source: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/improving-online-advertising/
More nerds mourning the future of Firefox: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/mozillas-ceo-doubles-down-on-them-being-an-advertising-company-now/
edit: typos.
Laura isn't Mozilla CEO since last December (she was interim's), although the new CEO probably has the same ideas.
Just like all the others I suppose.
Ah well, maybe all this magic AI tooling can get Konquerer up to speed.
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.
Don't know how y'all are getting noticeable performance improvements..
Ran speedometer and got no noticeable changes before/after the update. Everything feels the same too.
Side note, I hate how it looks now, with the rounded borders and everything. Some sidebars are rounded now too, why?!!
I truly doubt this is going to attract chrome users
I imagine people are mentioning browser behavior as a whole? For websites, Firefox's been fast enough for ages, as others noted above.
I updated the main post as I did measure both FF156 and FF157 and there was quite an improvement in speedometer and motionmark.
I had some serious problems with new Firefox and/or new YouTube but it turned out it was actually just Ghostery.