I use firefox on ubuntu and the performance is terrible. Its constantly crashing, tabs crash individually, it hangs, launching memory heavy websites seems to crash it most often. When I switched to chromium the performance got a lot better.
I use firefox on ubuntu as well and it works very nicely. Its RAM and CPU usage is negligible, sites load very fast, and the developer tools are awesome.
Some anecdotal data in the other direction, I made a comment about my experience on linux 5 months ago [1], and my opinion is still roughly the same (Except the blank tab problem has gone away after a Firefox update at some point, which WAS the biggest annoyance I had, so my mood has improved considerably since I made that post), and I have since taken to using Arch on an XPS, stock Ubuntu on another (more modestly specced) machine, and have had similar experiences there too.
That said I still use and prefer Firefox, but I also have to open up Chrome probably once every few weeks for various reasons, and it has occasional abhorrent behavior that I don't experience with any other program on the same machine.
I was having a similar experience earlier this year, so I reluctantly did the same for a while. I got sick of chromium though, really missed reader mode for one thing, so I decided to put in some more effort to troubleshoot.
For me what did it was switching to wayland (sway[1] specifically, from dwm on x11). Now it's a good step faster than chromium.
I agree with the sibling comment; there's something wrong going on, what you're describing isn't firefox's baseline.
> I see you are downvoted and I think that is wrong.
I downvoted the comment. I'm just not sure it adds anything useful to the conversation when it's not representative of the vast, vast majority of experiences that users have. It sounds like an anecdotal, isolated issue. I didn't post a top-level comment to say I've been using Firefox for over a decade without it crashing because it's just not remarkable or interesting.
I'd be more interested if some crash reports or BugZilla issues had been linked to substantiate the comment.
For what it's worth, I'd have downvoted a comment made in the same vein regarding Chrome too.
I didn't downvote you for dissenting, and I explained this in my comment.
But what can we take away from the anecdote? We don't know anything about your system's hardware components, we don't know if you're using X or Wayland, we don't know which versions of Firefox you tried. We've not seen any BugZilla reports or crash reports. We don't know what websites are problematic.
I would have no problems with folks saying "on device X, I had issues where the Firefox would use 100% of a CPU core when I visited website Y. Here's my https://profiler.firefox.com/ link, I reported it on BugZilla but the bug hasn't been fixed yet.". That's specific, useful anecdotal information that developers can follow up on and users can use to evaluate whether it's a deal breaker for them or not.
Generic comments like "performance is terrible for me, I've tried multiple times" are just going to get replies from users who've had no problems at all.
This thread is full of generic comments and anecdotes devoid of details. Did you downvote all of them as well? Or just the ones that don't agree with your opinion?
This is Hacker News not BugZilla. It's perfectly fine for users to expose their anecdotes without having to provide extensive details.
It only crashes for me after it automatically updates. The devs set it to intentionally crash when you open a new tab. I don't know if that makes it better or worse really.
I mean, if you replace application components underneath the running application through a distro-update, it's not that surprising that this doesn't result in a stable state. All kinds of application will become unhappy when you do a upgrade on a running system.
>The devs set it to intentionally crash when you open a new tab
Is it intentional? It sounds like the distro's package manager is swapping out the binaries from underneath it whilst it's running. I have some sympathy for the devs here, because I suspect it doesn't happen with the built-in updater (which, let's face it, most users will be using) which probably swaps the binaries on next start-up and just invites the user to restart the browser.
