Firefox on Linux slower than on Windows?

[ninaholic37]

364% CPU, not bad. Firefox running for 3207 hours is pretty good, I close it every time I leave.

 

[soccerballtux]

I've never seen > 1 CPU core loaded in firefox. what's this?

 

[replica9000]

I think Firefox has been able to use more cores since the last few versions. I'm on a 8-core machine, but I've never seen it use more than 4.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Firefox seems to get slower as it "ages". I recently reinstalled Linux and it was fast at first, and now it's back to being slow again. Scrolling certain web pages like Facebook and youtube is excruciating as it's so choppy and actually requires lot of effort to do, it's like if the page is made of concrete or something. Some web pages actually load slow, as if it was on dialup. They really need to get their head together and fix this, it's ridiculous. I don't really want to switch to Chromium again but I might have to.

 

[lxskllr]

I've never had an issue with firefox that couldn't be attributed to running nightlies. Subjectively, it's not the fastest browser, but it's fast enough. At this point, I wouldn't consider running any other current browser in its place.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Another issue, if anyone can confirm if they get it too? Is that random web sites will always show page cannot be displayed, connection reset, server not found or other similar error when they have not been accessed for a while. Hit refresh and it loads right away. So far there are 3 sites that it does this for. Originally before my clean install it was 2 of those same sites it did it to, but now it started doing it to another site.

 

[lxskllr]

Another issue, if anyone can confirm if they get it too? Is that random web sites will always show page cannot be displayed, connection reset, server not found or other similar error when they have not been accessed for a while. Hit refresh and it loads right away. So far there are 3 sites that it does this for. Originally before my clean install it was 2 of those same sites it did it to, but now it started doing it to another site.

Never

 

[MongGrel]

Amazon has HORRIBLE javascript, if you disable ssl-images-amazon.com in noscript it should be better. In fact I find a lot of sites now days have horrible javascript code that locks up the whole browser. I use noscript and only allow stuff as required, kinda a pain in the butt sometimes though especially with news sites, which will have like 30+ domains, it's gotten pretty ridiculous.

In general I find FF is actually faster and more stable in Linux than it is in Windows, though come to think of it I'd say they're pretty much equal now as I have not had issues in Windows for a while either as I use it at work.

+1

Have even been using Ghostery with NoScript myself lately on Firefox, seems to help.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Problem with no script is constantly having to add sites for 99% of websites to even load. With Amazon you can disable certain scripts but then the site is practically unusable. I wish people would stop coding so much garbage.

I was using noscript but just got tired of dealing with it. Would be nice if there was a central white list for it or something or if it blocked more specific scripts instead of domains.

 

[ninaholic37]

Firefox seems to get slower as it "ages". I recently reinstalled Linux and it was fast at first, and now it's back to being slow again. Scrolling certain web pages like Facebook and youtube is excruciating as it's so choppy and actually requires lot of effort to do, it's like if the page is made of concrete or something. Some web pages actually load slow, as if it was on dialup. They really need to get their head together and fix this, it's ridiculous. I don't really want to switch to Chromium again but I might have to.

I don't notice any performance degradation, but it makes sense that I don't, because I have Firefox set to Never Remember History / private browsing mode and don't use session restore, and I don't upgrade (because of Australis and other Chrome-like features being added), and each time I turn on the computer the same image and profile data is loaded into ram as the last time, so it's always the exact same files and setup. There's no way Firefox itself could be the cause if I have more slowdown on different days because of this I think, but I don't anyway.

Another issue, if anyone can confirm if they get it too? Is that random web sites will always show page cannot be displayed, connection reset, server not found or other similar error when they have not been accessed for a while. Hit refresh and it loads right away. So far there are 3 sites that it does this for. Originally before my clean install it was 2 of those same sites it did it to, but now it started doing it to another site.

I never see this, except if I access a website quickly right after I turn my computer on before I'm fully connected to the internet, but again I think having Firefox set to Never Remember History / private browsing mode and not using session restore fixes a lot of potential bugs and performance quirks that might arise over time.

Problem with no script is constantly having to add sites for 99% of websites to even load. With Amazon you can disable certain scripts but then the site is practically unusable. I wish people would stop coding so much garbage.

I was using noscript but just got tired of dealing with it. Would be nice if there was a central white list for it or something or if it blocked more specific scripts instead of domains.

I used to use JS Switch, which is a simple and fast way to turn Javascript on and off when you need it with a button on the navigation bar, but I found that just adding the right filters to uBlock or Adblock Edge gets rid of most annoying scripts also. I'm sort of torn between the two ideas, or just not doing anything (keeping Flash disabled), and did find NoScript to be too convoluted of a solution for me as well.

 

[Red Squirrel]

It seems to be getting worse and worse, I'm starting to wonder if Firefox has some kind of cache that it keeps building and building and building that somehow affects scrolling. Even in phpmyadmin scrolling is becoming practically unusable. Everything is super jumpy it's horrible. I only have like 5 tabs opened. Why is it only doing this to me? I've also turned off hardware acceleration as that is known to cause this issue.

 

[mxnerd]

Chrome & Firefox has becoming like IE.

Now both constantly hangs from time to time even I have uBlock Origin.

Don't really know it's browser problem or network problem.

 

[ninaholic37]

It seems to be getting worse and worse, I'm starting to wonder if Firefox has some kind of cache that it keeps building and building and building that somehow affects scrolling. Even in phpmyadmin scrolling is becoming practically unusable. Everything is super jumpy it's horrible. I only have like 5 tabs opened. Why is it only doing this to me? I've also turned off hardware acceleration as that is known to cause this issue.

How do you scroll? By moving the middle scroll-wheel thing on a mouse up and down? Just curious. I remember mikeymikec mentioning a similar problem in Windows with newer Firefox versions but it was when using the middle "button" to scroll (I didn't even know you could do that :awe: and still haven't tried it yet):

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?p=37288102#post37288102

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah I always use mouse scroll wheel, usually by just going up/down but sometimes auto scroll. Can't imagine doing it any other way.

 

[zambien1]

One reason why FF is slower under *nix is because GPU acceleration isn't as robust as it is under Windows and OS X. Many GPU acceleration features are currently buggy and disabled for many GPUs. Same goes for Chromium/Chrome (less severe however).

MSE is also disabled by default in FF IIRC due to bugs which makes youtube default to flash...

This.

I fought with getting FF and Chrome working in Unity and Xubuntu (xfce4) with the expectation that it would be as snappy as Windows. I could never get it to that point. A big part of the issue is the graphics drivers, versions, etc and you can make some improvement by doing some research and getting the right ones.

But then you also have to go into some configurations pages and turn on certain things.

Even after doing that you will find that many acceleration options will not be enabled at all. You may have better luck downloading chrome beta/dev but I have read some threads where people from google said they may not support acceleration under linux by default. Relevant threads:

http://www.webupd8.org/2014/01/enable-hardware-acceleration-in-chrome.html

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTYyMDk



25 posts on my account - can finally add a sig!

 

[zambien1]

It seems to be getting worse and worse, I'm starting to wonder if Firefox has some kind of cache that it keeps building and building and building that somehow affects scrolling. Even in phpmyadmin scrolling is becoming practically unusable. Everything is super jumpy it's horrible. I only have like 5 tabs opened. Why is it only doing this to me? I've also turned off hardware acceleration as that is known to cause this issue.

To clean up go in to a shell and kill FireFox. Also, there are ways to disable the cache. Yes, there will be a fairly large cache on your drive somewhere and there have been reports of this causing issues.

 

[PingSpike]

Well I found the answer on REDDIT today.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/3dgaem/fix_slow_amazon_under_firefox_without_losing/


Add the following to uBlock/AdBlockPlus filters.

snip

Thanks for that, its a much more elegant solution.

 

[PingSpike]

Honestly, I don't have a lot of the problems here. I run with like 200 tabs open all the time, but most usually aren't loaded. Aside from the slow amazon page loads. There's an add on to decay unload tabs but I haven't needed it. I just close the browser sometimes. I just had firefox running kind of slow but it was using 2GB of ram which is the process limit for 32bit so I just restarted it and its fine again.

Firefox pretty much always says it crashed and asks if I want to restore tabs when I reopen it...but it remembers the tabs for restore so there is pretty much no difference from the crash/fail to restore working and failing the first time.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I just came back from a fresh boot since there was a power outage the other day then I started night shifts so never turned my PC back on.

STILL bloody slow. It seems the only way to speed it up is to format and reinstall every now and then. Ridiculous. They need to fix this. Facebook and other badly written sites have horrible scrolling and it just gets worse and worse. Opening and closing tabs is starting to get slow too.

I just wish the concept of a default browser worked properly in Linux as I'd switch to chrome, but Linux handles default browser weirdly, it's really inconsistent and seems to be app dependent. Ex: in Thunderbird I could not get email links to open with Chrome unless it was HTTPS. In other apps no links opened with Chrome. Even after uninstalling Firefox it STILL tried to use Firefox. So it seems in Linux they WANT you to use Firefox. I can see why as Chrome is not exactly "libre" with all the google stuff, even though you can avoid it, it's still there.

 

[ninaholic37]

Even after uninstalling Firefox it STILL tried to use Firefox. So it seems in Linux they WANT you to use Firefox. I can see why as Chrome is not exactly "libre" with all the google stuff, even though you can avoid it, it's still there.

I think it's because Chrome doesn't know how to change the default browser in Linux. When you check "Yes" to use it as default browser, it probably still expects Windows or some other Linux environment and fails silently. There is probably a "default application chooser" you can do it from. For me, my default application chooser goes to firefox and firefox.bin in usr/bin, and I can just open those files as text and change their strings to point somewhere else, but that is more hackish.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah I ended up having to change it in the system settings and not within chrome but still did not work. I did not try it on this particular installation though so maybe I'll get better luck.

Though I think this particular instance is not just Firefox, it seems EVERYTHING is slow now on this computer. It just locked up a while ago. Looks like I'll be stuck in yet another endless problem cycle.

Edit: I think FF is still a problem though. It's constantly using at least 20% cpu. Looks like I'm dealing with two separate issues here.

 

[ninaholic37]

Edit: I think FF is still a problem though. It's constantly using at least 20% cpu. Looks like I'm dealing with two separate issues here.

What CPU do you have? And what are you using to measure the CPU usage? I have noticed that in htop on my system, 20% CPU means 20% CPU @800MHz (lowest speedstep), it has to hit 50-95% CPU (depending on what I set the up_threshold to) at 800MHz before it can even bump up to 1066MHz or higher. Since my CPU can go to 1.86GHz, 20% CPU @800MHz would mean the equivalent of 8% CPU @1.86GHz from what I understand. With 5 tabs open, htop says my Firefox 28 was using a constant 0.0% CPU @800MHz, then when I logged into anandtech it raised to 14% CPU @800MHz, after I log out it went back to 0.0% CPU @800MHz, then when I logged in again it did the same thing. Not sure what's up with that. I guess it's better to browse Anandtech offline? :awe:

 

[Red Squirrel]

Just using top to measure, I think it takes all cores into account, so 25% is actually 100% of one core, if it's a quad core.

CPU is Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-4150 CPU @ 3.50GHz. Stock speed, no special settings... I have too much bad luck to start messing with overclocking.

 

[ninaholic37]

Just using top to measure, I think it takes all cores into account, so 25% is actually 100% of one core, if it's a quad core.

Interesting. Apparently I can hit '1' (the one key) while in top to switch modes. In the not-lumped-into-1-core mode, the second line then switches from CPU to CPU0, CPU1, etc. Mine just says CPU until I hit 1 to switch to this mode.