Since few last betas of Firefox 15 we’re feeling Mozilla browser less snappier than Firefox 14 and it is loading pages slowly, seems the case with more users who submitted feedback to Mozilla about beta version of Firefox as slow, slowly., Its even seems difficult for Mozilla to figure out causes for slowness. We can say from the discussion mentioned in bug below that Firefox 15 is loading pages slowly and consuming more memory than Firefox 14.
Bug 784512 with title “ per input: reports slowness is up about 100% in Firefox 15 vs. 14” says it all . “Mentions of slow in input for Firefox 15 over the last 3 weeks
Running a statistical analysis of word frequencies in input, we have twice as much feedback mentioning slow|slowly|speed|forever in 15 relative to 14.”
Lot of users submitted comments where word “slow” is included in almost every comment
Here is the summary of what users feeling with current beta version of Firefox
- Slow downloads
- Slow page loads
- Frequent crashes
- Flash issues
- High ram usage
- Slow start-up
- Slow games/videos
- Slow search
- Mentions of a number of sites including Facebook, twitter, tumbler, and more
- Slower than previous versions
Flash issues: Is there something to do with Flash Player Protected Mode for Firefox which introduced in Flash 11.3? users feel more crashes happening with Flash Player 11.3 release onwards. It’s true in case of Firefox 14, Adobe recommended to temporarily disable Sandbox for Flash Player. But those issues are fixed, Adobe had already released Flash 11.4 recently.
Slow Search: Blame HTTPS search of Google introduced in Firefox 14, its true that encrypted search returns search results slower than HTTP search.
Slow Startup: We can agree with this Firefox 15 very slow to take off than Firefox 14.
Its true that majority comments are from Windows users, is that Firefox 15 slowness is something platform specific?
Most users mentioned Facebook games and videos (supposed to be from YouTube) loading Slow. With telemetry data too Mozilla doesn’t find out noticeable difference between the two builds. Mozilla looking to get more info if any users can spot performance issue in Firefox 15 that can’t be reproduced in Firefox 14.
We’re hoping Mozilla to find out the causes for performance degradation in Firefox 15 vs. Firefox 14 we want them to fix them in the beta phase, where we’ve Firefox 15 final scheduled to released on 28th of this month.
Are you using Firefox 15 beta? is it slow for you? share with us in comments.
Firefox 15 on Linux seems faster or at the same speed as Firefox 14.
Firefox 15 on Windows 7 feels a lot slower.
My Aunt uses firefox 15 final on her netbook. It seems quite a bit slower at scrolling than firefox 14. Could just be a crashed flash plugin though, hogging up that Atom CPU..
Yes credit must go to Flash for crashes in Firefox 15.
I have had the same problem – Firefox 15 slows browsing to a crawl. Adobe Flash is not the issue (same Firefox performance with 3 versions of Flash or no Flash at all). Opera and even an old IE version work much faster with no memory or CPU overloads. I have been searching for an answer, but am about ready to drop Firefox. No way I should have to wait >17 seconds for a simple page load.
Noticed a massive performance hit on OSX 10.8.1 with a Retina Macbook Pro.
Some CSS heavy parts get blanked out when scrolled out of viewport then take 2-3 seconds to reappear.
Compared on a much slower virtualized Windows machine /w FF 12 -> was pretty snappy. Then upgraded to FF15 and bam slow as hell and pretty much unusable.
Want a downgrade now.
Clever C nailed it. I don’t know what the problem is with recent versions of Firefox, but old versions of Internet Explorer are indeed loading pages faster and using less CPU.
Firefox basically freezes for a handful of seconds every time a page loads. Unbelievable.
Do you mean to say old versions of Internet Explorer?
With all the updates Firefox has had this year, the only thing that they seemed to accomplished is making it slower with every release.
I used to really like Firefox, but I may now have to make a permanent move to Chrome.
Downloading files is glacial for me (Mac Snow Leopard). I allow the download window to stay open until complete, and 200 kb files that were just a quick flash are now taking 2-3 seconds. Haven’t tested yet with large files. But this seems like a big problem. I have the same add-ons as with 14 (NoScript, Ghostery, Better Privacy. WT).
As with 14, I get a lot (15 seconds) of hard drive crunching when I open FF. Other browsers do not do this. I don’t know what it is doing for all that time.
Firefox is crazy slow now, I’ve had to switch to internet explorer O.o
Firefox 15 is probably one of the worst releases since 3.6. I don’t know what’s going on but on a Mac Pro tower (only a year old) running 10.6.8 it crawls to a snail’s pace on video and flash and sites with ads (like news sites). I’ve also noticed that having more than 7 tabs open causes some sort of slow down. I use to be able to toggle between tabs quickly, now it takes a few seconds for the browser to catch up. I’ve been testing it side by side with Chrome and Opera (even on my macbook and older G5 tower) and they don’t have any of these problems on the same sites I visit. Maybe all these back-to-back releases are too much for the Mozilla team to handle efficiently. I’d rather they take needed time to release an update with no flaws than this crap which is turning us away.
FF 15 on Linux is hopeless, I want to go back to at least FF 14 when it worked. Downloads are hopeless, the download window opens, and it takes ages to download what was previously a matter of seconds. It crashes frequently for no apparent reason, and is a nuisance to use. I’ll see how to remove FF15 and reinstall FF14 . and turn off automatic updates. This is really a “Back to the drawing board” – fast.