Firefox performance tuning

Discussion in 'other software & services' started by summerheat, Dec 18, 2015.

  1. summerheat

    summerheat Registered Member

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    I've read several postings here saying that Firefox is slower than Google Chrome. This might be true, but in my experience this is mainly caused by rather conservative default settings in about:config.

    There are thousands of websites which present more or less great tips how to speed up Firefox (plus a lot of other useful settings). But two of them are particularly helpful, IMHO:

    https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox_tweaks
    http://heptagrama.com/best-firefox-configuration.htm

    For example, OMTC should be enabled by default since Firefox 40 - it was not in my case. After enabling it, also enabling pipelining, creating the content.notify.ontimer and content.notify.interval settings and modifying browser.sessionstore.interval you should notice a considerable performance boost. Creating the integer nglayout.initialpaint.delay and setting it to 0 might also make sense.

    What's your experiences?
     
  2. Brummelchen

    Brummelchen Registered Member

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    complete rubbish, forget it please. both have different focussed improvements. firefox now has the fastes javascript engine, ofc chromium has benefits of it and vice versa.

    OMTC is important for its engine improvement
    https://wiki.mozilla.org/Platform/GFX/OffMainThreadCompositing
    i may happen (by disabling) firefox will crash at startup, depends on your system.

    "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" controls the time between receiving data and displaying data as website. time in milli-seconds, you dont really see 50ms
    it seems that this settings become deprecated, it is not present by default, some has to insert it manually. Firefox lost a lot of this pseudo performance settings, to glad.

    if you experience a slower firefox try a clean profile to get the differences. in most cases slow down is caused by system or 3rd-party programs, like plugins, antivirus in most cases, outdated addons, addons in common - and those stupid cleaners/tweaker. if you use adblock (plus/edge) this IS slowing down extremly, and is hungry for memory.

    those comments you read are from a pretty low minority group of people who are not even close to familiar with firefox or its settings or internal processes. they are experiencing around with no plan and the results are only usable on their specific system and the used firefox version - can be complete different next version due improvements. and that is what you need in mind. leave it untouched as long you can.

    try any "browser speed test" - once with a new profile and once with your settings.

    HTH
     
  3. summerheat

    summerheat Registered Member

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    Yes, but rendering performance is still another thing.

    I'm using uBlock Origin, of course.

    In any case, after applying above mentioned tweaks sites like spiegel.de load noticeably faster. This may not be reflected in a browser speed test - but Firefox simply feels snappier.
     
  4. Brummelchen

    Brummelchen Registered Member

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    which tweaks exactly did you apply?
     
  5. The Red Moon

    The Red Moon Registered Member

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    depends on which operating system as to the speed comparison between chrome and firefox.I have found that pale moon on my linux computer runs just as fast if not faster than chrome did.
     
  6. Nightwalker

    Nightwalker Registered Member

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    I really want to go back to Firefox but Chrome is much smoother in my machine that isnt funny, rendering performance is superior too.
     
  7. bjm_

    bjm_ Registered Member

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    http://www.ghacks.net/2014/01/22/ultimate-guide-making-firefox-load-websites-faster/
    FWIW ~ I've tried pipelining and such. No joy.
    I feel toggle prefetch from default helps.
    network.dns.disable
    network.prefetch-next
    beacon.enabled
    But, I think un-check Always check if Firefox is default / Check for updates / Data Choices helps too. Just me.
    I generally see Chrome x32 render pages faster than Firefox x64.
    That's why I've tried some FF tweaks.
    I haven't figured out how to tweak Chrome Omnibox. Font is too small and I prefer FF's discrete one-click search box.
     
    Last edited: Dec 20, 2015
  8. Gullible Jones

    Gullible Jones Registered Member

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    I generally see Firefox render pages perhaps 50% faster than Chrome. The problem is it's not as responsive while rendering large/heavy pages like GMail.

    My main workaround at the moment is to use GMail Mobile (m.gmail.com), which works fine.

    Other things you could try:
    - Reducing the disk cache size, or possibly disabling it. Firefox disk cache seems to generate a lot of I/O operations; this measure seems to have helped, but no benchmarks so i can't really say. Also this will obviously lead to more bandwidth usage...
    - If possible, swapping in a faster hard drive. Most laptop drives are 5400 RPM, and as such perform badly under almost all conditions.

    And Linux-specific stuff:
    - Use lighter GTK themes (e.g. Clearlooks-Phenix instead of Adwaita). Current default GTK themes are rather bloated.
    - Use a non-compositing window manager, e.g. Openbox instead of Compiz. OpenGL compositing is a resource hog.

    One other thing I've found helpful on Linux - which is kind of weird - is a restrictive AppArmor profile. I'm guessing, looking the audit logs, that this is because blocking Firefox from most of $HOME aborts a bunch of disk reads.

    (In any case, if you're using Firefox on Linux, an AppArmor profile for it is an extremely good idea IMO.)
     
  9. ArchiveX

    ArchiveX Registered Member

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    So many tweaks...:confused:
     
  10. HAN

    HAN Registered Member

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    I see very little difference between them on any PC I use. I agree that tweaks of any kind, on either browser makes comparisons (for the average user) fairly meaningless. I just use whichever is available and cruise on down the (Internet) highway... :)
     
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