Firefox 2: Slower than Predecessor

I found FF2 slow as well, so I looked around and tried out a few other alternative-alternative browsers and stayed with Opera9. Opera’s controls are set up a little different than IE or FF, but I’ve found it fairly easy to configure once you learn what you can and can’t modify. Opera was also much faster in my experience. It’s got a few minor startup and shut down issues dealing with how it caches and collects history data. I know there isn’t one browser that will suit everyone, and I used FF for more than a year and really appreciated some of it’s features, but Opera seemed to me to be a real upgrade compared to FF, although some banking sites and other places like that don’t support it. What didn’t you like about Opera?

We have pretty good feedback channels and scrollwheel concern hasn’t surfaced in any of those channels. Can you tell us more about your system, your settings, and any browser extensions you’re using?

As far as system and settings go it’s a little bit older system but still plenty powerful to run today’s modern games. Settings are default.

Extensions:
AdSense Notifier
CoLT
DOM Inspector
FasterFox
Firebug
Forecastfox
Google Toolbar
Greasemonkey (Disabled)
IE Tab
PDF Download
Signature
StumbleUpon
Tabbrowser Preferences

Trust me… If I knew what the problem was I’d fix it. However, the problem is sporadic (my scroll wheel seems to work fine now).

I’ve never had any problem with FX2. My guess is that most of the issues that people seem to have are caused by the fact that uninstall-process is preserving all extensions and settings from previous versions, which is sometimes fine, but I prefer total clean installation, especially in case of major version change. For me, that means backup of bookmarks and deleting all folders of FX after uninstalling (you know, those folders in Application Data, Local Settings, Program Files). Fresh install then works absolutely great.

I might have to try that here.

I’d recommend disabling all of your extensions, (note, not uninstalling them, just disabling them) and then enabling them one by one with a few hours of usage between each one so that when the problem creeps in again, if it was an extension, you’ll be able to identify the extension that was causing the problem. I’d suggest starting by testing to see if it’s Firebug (do you have firebug enabled for all sites? If so, try telling Firebug to only be enabled for sites you’re actually testing. It can cause extreme “performance” issues because it’s doing quite a bit of work when the page is doing work). Next, I’d see if it was FasterFox. There’s a reason we don’t have our Gecko preferences set to those values and FasterFox can cause all kinds of performance and web page display problems for some users. Next, I’d disable Tabbrowsers Preferences. That messes with some widget code that probably shouldn’t be messed with and can cause problems under certain configurations.

I don’t often hear of problems with those other extensions unless two of them are interacting poorly in combination.

- A

I went ahead and disabled FasterFox and FireBug. I don’t have a high need for those two plugins.

We’ll see how that goes for a few days.

I also have horrible problems with Firefox and memory issues both at home and work. I’ve tried the extension test in the past, but didn’t get definitive results. I’ll try it again over the weekend, but I really do think there could be problems beyond extensions. FF1 had memory issues as well.

I have that exact same mouse scroll wheel problem with FF2. Glad it’s not just me…

Well… I’m still having the same problems. Now, a new one has come to light. When clicking on tabs nothing happens. I can only switch between tabs by using CTRL+TAB.

Firefox is close to getting dumped for a different browser.

I also am experiencing the same problems with FF2, i.e., loss of the scroll wheel on my mouse after the screensaver starts, and terrible memory/resource problems. I have to restart the browser continually. I sure hope someone comes up with the solution. In the meantime, would I suffer greatly if I went back to FF 1.58?

My scrollwheel works better than the scrollbar, which lags quite a bit. I also have significant lag when I click to select something, especially when I click a form box to enter text. I’ll get lag, sometimes an hourglass, and have to wait to start typing. I’m also seeing significant lag using gmail. The lag is not always consistent. I’m using 2.0.0.1 with Colorzilla, Context Search, FasterFox, Google Notebook, Search Status, and Chatzilla. I tried removing Chatzilla, it wasn’t the culprit. I’ll disable everything else and see what happens.

I disabled the plugins with no effect, though I find I’m not missing them all th at much.

As a next step I backed up the data in my profile, then deleted a bunch of zero-length cookies.txt and sesssions.js files I found there. “A bunch” means thousands… I think there were something like 5000 sessions.js files. I also x’d out a profile that was in the mozilla subdirectory in Application Data, at the same level as the Mozilla directory. It was a separate profile; I couldn’t figure out what it was for, but a couple of the files in there had recent dates.

Now Firefox 2 is running just fine, so one of those steps did the trick.

Where did you find the sessions.js files? I just searched my PC and couldn’t find a single one.

Sorry, I ditzed the file name… it was sessionstore-[number].js. This is related to a known problem:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=351551

I only had one such file.

Yeah and they’re talking about 100+ files, as I recall… yet I had over 5000, all created at the same time. I’m not 100% certain how they were affecting performance - i think maybe they were causing errors that were being logged, and the overhead of logging was affecting performance. Whatever the case, I’m relieved to’ve found the problem. I thought I was going to have to abandon Firefox. I was already reading mail in IE7 and checking out Opera (which was slow and jerky, i thought).

I returned to FireFox 1.5 after 2 proved to be a memory hog, to the point of crashing my system if left open overnight. This is no good. I must have spent about a day trying all the recommended fixes, disabling extensions, even did a clean install on a new OS, on a new HD and it was still a memory pig. Unfortunately FF2 appears to be another example of the “forwards is actually backwards” syndrome, all too common in the computer business. So 1.5 it is.

It’s a ridiculous state of affairs–I regularly use FF1.5 on my old laptop which only has 256 RAM with no issues at all– FF2 would be using that much RAM in a couple of hours just doing nothing.

FF performance is abysmal. Many of us run veritable supercomputers… Is there a fundamental architectural flaw? IE4 is looking attractive again. I will miss adblock, etc.

Opera is awful quick.

One more voice here begging for performance related fixes. Back when I eventually dumped Netscape for IE, it was due to constant crashing. Now I am going to need to switch to something else again because of scrolling issue (not just scrollwheel but scrollbar also) and tab change issue (keyboard works but mouse does not).

All those issue only happen after FF was running for a while and I have a few tabs open, so if this info is helpful to the team, there it is.

Safari seems attractive right now…

My PC was crashing and I tried lots of the usual stuff, never suspecting good old Firefox and then I saw 50% CPU from FF usage with 3 tabs open and now I have gone back to IE and problem solved. But I love FF UI and don’t want to go back to IE. Aaargh!!