I Want To Like Firefox

I really like Firefox’s fully customizable UI and some of its great extensions like Convergence and NoScript. The pinned tabs behave really nicely and I can change behaviors through about:config easily.

But… it really is just slower than Chrome. I’m told it’s different on iOS and Windows but on Ubuntu 12.04 there is some sorta issue. My blog is choppy and when I click the ‘New Post’ and the little screen flows down it’s very choppy and not fully loaded by the time it’s down.

On some sites it’s more noticeable than others.

There’s also the issue of UI responsiveness. On Chrome if I have a heavy page loading on Tab A my Tab B is still fine and not held down and I can move between tabs B and C with ease. Scrolling is just as fast as it should be and it’s just generally smoother to move around the UI when watching a video or loading a page.

Firefox just can’t compete on this aspect. The UI gets really slow when a page is loading and as I have three pinned tabs that all need to load on startup (Twitter, GMail, and this page) the browser is unusable until each one has loaded – or close to it.

I think ChromeOS has seriously helped Chrome improve performance on Linux. For me the difference is quite noticeable, I can’t attribute it to placebo as it’s not just ‘it feels slow’.