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Firefox Got Faster for Real Users in 2023 (hacks.mozilla.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[+] -15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Rendering was never a problem with FF, but it's good to see some progress on that front as well. Startup times are still atrocious. My whole OS can book 4 times over before Firefox decides it's the right time to start rendering something.

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Opens just as quickly as any other program for me.

    Either your boot time is like 0.05 seconds or you have a problem.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

    I for sure have a problem. But it basically boils down to remove your profile, which is not an option. I did report the issue number of times and always got "do a refresh", which I always do and it always doesn't help. Even made a video for them, since it doesn't sound believable. This is on my X1 Carbon, which has M.2 drive. On my desktop with, at the time, HDD it was this slow.

    At this point am only using Firefox out of spite so everyone doesn't end up on Chrome since I remember what it was like for one company to have a huge monopoly. But I'd switch in a blink of an eye otherwise.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    So suffering through atrocious load times every day is more palatable than just setting up a new profile?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    It's not every day. My computer doesn't get rebooted that often, maybe once in a month or two. So I got use to waiting that one time. But in general yes, I don't want another profile as this one is synchronized with other devices and has all kinds of things I'd have to redo to fix an issue that shouldn't exist in the first place.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Have you tried to start it from the terminal? Maybe there is some insight into which part of the startup process is taking so much time

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    When I was trying to solve this issue I tried pretty much everything. It boils down to something related to my profile. Start without one or with a different one, it works as expected. The moment I sync my profile it bogs down. And am not sure what is wrong with my profile. I have a lot of bookmarks but not abnormally so. History is configured as with everyone else, no special config there.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    What if you export your bookmarks and your addons, then delete your profile, create a new profile and sync NOTHING from your firefox account. Then import the boomarks, restart and see if that is the issue. Then add your addons one by one and restart inbetween to see if one acts up. Then change your firefox settings. Then turn your sync back on. Also are you using a normal installation or a flatpak, snap, etc?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Tried that. The moment bookmarks are in and I sync account that's when it slows down. So I have to forego one or both. Also am not using neither installation nor flatpak, it's a simple tar ball because it's FF Dev edition. Doesn't come packaged.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Is it just bookmarks, or is it bookmarks and sync? I'd export your bookmarks as JSON or something and look through it, either with a text editor or some tool, and make sure there isn't some enormously huge string, or one containing unsupported characters, that's tripping something up somehow.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Maybe export your profile to some other browser. Wipe your Firefox install and all of its user data. Reinstall Firefox import from the other browser.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    The moment I import bookmarks and add my FF account things slow down. Tried all of that already.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    That's an interesting tell. Assuming you don't have several gigs of bookmarks, The next step would be to break the bookmark file apart into multiple pieces and see which section is punking you. Hell even just exporting it to HTML, You might find a really long or malformed mark by looking over the file.

    Anyway, here I go providing more support for somebody that's not asking for it. Good luck in your endeavors

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    It's not that I am not asking for it, it's just that I've been through all of this multiple times. Tried things in my power to fix to no success. I have indeed became indifferent. Am guessing someone at Mozilla could have dug up where the issue lies if they cared enough but most frequent answer I've got from them was "do a refresh".

    Also, no, I don't have gigabytes of bookmarks. But even if I did, that shouldn't really affect startup time. We have databases for a reason, just query at the moment I search for them.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    What if you delete all your bookmarks? Does that help?

    What about deleting all bookmarks, reinstall Firefox then sync account with no bookmarks.

    What about exporting bookmarks and adding them to a fresh Firefox without a profile.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I think bookmarks are part of the issue but not whole. It's been more than a year since I tried debugging this and gave up. My machine doesn't get shut down often and this wait happens only on fresh start. So I kind of learned to live with it.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    That's wack. I've never seen Firefox that take long to open. Here's a video of it opening in a VM running Ubuntu 22.04: https://streamable.com/aqkftv

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I know, mine starts like that on second start. First one always takes a while. After upgrade to SSH and M.2 it is faster but still not immediate like yours. And it's not even a slow and outdated machine.

    Sure it's not a total beast, but still 12 cores and 32GB of RAM with decently fast SSD.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Then something is fishy with your install. Maybe something to do with the DNS or the Firefox version you're using, or maybe just Debian.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago

    DNS is not to blame here since Chrome and other applications work perfectly fine. Firefox in question is Developer Edition, so it's bleeding edge new. And it's not Debian because everything works fine until I sync my profile, then things slow down.

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  • [+] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Nope, Debian Testing on machine with 12 cores and 32GB of RAM and 3GB/s M.2 drive.

    And my systemd-analyze says graphical.target reached after 5.690s in userspace. Most of which is network manager waiting for online status, mounting filesystems, and timesyncd waiting clock update.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Sounds like you have a borked dbus or is using the GTK_USE_PORTAL env variable, 20 second timeouts are gtks standard way of dealing with something it doesn't like. Firefox should take < 1 second to start fresh and takes < 3s for me, restoring hundreds of tabs

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