I had the opposite experience, with the same machine (Mid-2011 MBA). Firefox, even with plugins, was superior to Chrome for some time now. Anecdote and data and all that jazz.
4.8ghz quad core, 8gb ram, gtx 580. Firefox is consistently slower on my machine sadly (I've also got 3 script blockers/whitelists in chrome with tons of extensions and still outperforms.)
I recently (this past week) got a brand new MBPr, 16G RAM, etc. FF provides a better experience Chrome, still. So, once again, anecdote and data and all that jazz.
> Maybe you and others in the Firefox community don't realize this...
We do.
> This is about users having bad experiences when using Firefox.
Every company creates bad experiences for some users. Hell, I've had bad experiences with Apple technical support, the apparent gold-standard of customer support.
> Your positive experience in no way negates these bad experiences.
And vice-versa. So what? What's the point? If I can't share my positive experience, they can't share their negative ones?
Maybe you think comments like "My experience was bad" is helpful and worthwhile. Maybe. But only if the inverse is true.
So, don't complain when people share anecdotes you don't like. Either accept them, or don't.
This seams to be a problem with your machine. I also use a macbook air (End 2013) and dont have this problem (or feel any Lag on Tab-Actions). Even on my old Ubuntu-rig it doesnt have this problem. Either in Firefox or Chrome.
Your response is the kind that has given the Firefox community a rather bad reputation when it comes to addressing problems reported by users.
Instead of accepting that Firefox may indeed have performance problem, you immediately discount this possibility, instead blaming it on mr_november's computer.
It's irrelevant that it isn't happening on your laptop that's over 2 years newer than his is. It's irrelevant that it isn't happening on your Ubuntu system. None of that matters.
I don't doubt for a second that he is in fact running into performance problems with Firefox. He isn't alone. Many people report Firefox having worse performance than Chrome does on the same system. I've experienced this, too.
Yet instead of addressing and fixing these very real performance problems that have been brought up time and time again by many users, the Firefox community and developers seem content to deny that they exist, or refuse to consider that it may be a problem with Firefox (like you've done), or point to useless and totally unrealistic benchmarks to suggest it isn't a problem.
But worst of all is how mr_november's comment has been voted down. It's one thing to deny that the problem exists, but it's much worse to try to actively censor those who have merely pointed out a very legitimate and troubling issue.
Firefox has been losing market share for some time now, and this trend will only continue as long as Firefox's performance problems go unaddressed, and the Firefox community mistreats anyone who dares mention that such problems still exist.
But worst of all is how mr_november's comment has been voted down. It's one thing to deny that the problem exists, but it's much worse to try to actively censor those who have merely pointed out a very legitimate and troubling issue.
'Actively censor ... a troubling issue'? You make it sound like a police state.
Firefox has been losing market share for some time now, and this trend will only continue as long as Firefox's performance problems go unaddressed
Firefox's problem is shedding it's past reputation. It really isn't that slow anymore - it depends on what you're doing in the chrome vs firefox wars. I work with a bunch of chromeheads, and they all spurn ff because of that past reputation.
In actuality, they have as many problems with chrome as they do with firefox - I'm constantly saying "[bug] not evident on firefox" and they express puzzlement that The Awesomeness That Is Chrome actually has a problem other browsers don't. Not to mention that a lot of the bugs I do run into on FF are because of their 'designed-on-chrome-for-chrome' default mindset. The bugs do get sorted out, but the perception that FF is so much worse than chrome isn't reflective of the truth of the matter. They're pretty similar these days, swings and roundabouts.
Yes, voting down a legitimate comment here so that it's greyed out, thus making it more difficult to read, is a form of censorship.
As for Firefox's reputation, I think it still has a reputation for poor performance because, contrary to what you and others may claim, a lot of people still find recent releases to be slower than Chrome and other browsers.
It will never be able to shed its reputation for poor performance as long as it still suffers from those problems. And these problems will persist as long as the Firefox community continues to deny that they exist, or go out of their way to suppress discussion of these very real performance problems.
I work on the desktop performance team and my job is to address performance issues. It is mistaken to suggest that we don't care about performance and responsiveness.
Can you please address why we haven't seen much progress, even after so many years?
You and others involved with Firefox may choose to deny it, but a lot of people still find recent versions of Firefox to be slow and/or to suffer from stability problems.
For example, just look at the discussion at Slashdot today about the Firefox 31 release:
Whenever Firefox is discussed, those kinds of comments seem to be quite common. While some may choose to brush them off, to me it indicates that Firefox has some real problems, and these problems just aren't being fixed. We wouldn't see people continually bringing up these problems if they truly had been fixed.
I have never denied anything and I do not appreciate you making such accusations toward me. Having said that, I have a few remarks about this post:
1) People making vague complaints on discussion forums or social media is not going to get the right information to the right people. We can't fix problems by spending all our time scavenging (HN|reddit|slashdot|whatever) for complaints. Even if we could, they wouldn't contain enough information to act on them. It's super important for the community to help us out: If you are having performance problems, you absolutely need to be filing them at https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?format=guided
2) Just like any other type of bug, we cannot do anything about people's problems unless we know what is wrong. Ideally we would have information about the user's hardware and OS, which extensions they have installed (and better yet, is it reproducible with no extensions at all), steps to reproduce and diagnostic information to help us.
about:memory and the Gecko profiler (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Performance...) are essential tools that we provide for diagnosing this stuff. If you're savvy enough to be reading HN, you're savvy enough to use those, and you should attach output from those tools to the memory/perf bugs that you file.
3) For people who are not tech savvy, we try our best to analyze telemetry information on their behalf, but for privacy reasons we only do so on the release channel if users opt in. The more users that opt in to telemetry, the better the data that we receive.
4) Finally, IMHO many people need to come to grips with the fact that modern web browsers are much more complex and capable than their pioneers were. I see lots of complaining from people who want their browser to have the same memory footprint as Netscape 2.0 and that just isn't reasonable.
Have you tried going to the special "about:support" URL and clicking the "Reset Firefox" button at the top right? This creates a new profile and imports all your existing bookmarks, history, saved passwords, etc. but resets preferences back to defaults and recreates all the databases from scratch. If there's any settings from old version of Firefox that are confusing the new version, or poorly-laid-out database files that can't be efficiently updated, this should clean them up.
I run it on a macbook white plastic (old). Firefox runs well. It does get tired sometimes (around 3pm). I usually go to about:memory and clean up.
That or restart it.
I'm talking about actions you do multiple times an hour - opening a new tab, closing a tab, rearranging tabs etc.
This is with no extensions in use, on a mid-2011 fully specced out macbook air.
It's unfortunate but the lag is clear and I can't use it as my primary when I know a better solution is right in front of me, that being Chrome.