Is it just me or has Firefox really degraded in quality?

[deuces]

Firefox was my goto browser once upon a time but in the past few years it's quality has really fallen behind chrome and even edge. The problem starts when I load it up. Unlike chrome or edge that will start instantly(on an SSD), firefox will take at least 5 seconds to boot and become responsive. It is still slow in everything else too such as opening a new tab. Then there are all the little things like having to restart after installing most add ons, or the CTRL+F feature just not being as user friendly as chrome. I just mourn for it now.

[bill]

It's usually the fault of the extensions you're running. Try troubleshooting in safe mode [support.mozilla.org].

[deuces]

It happens with a clean install with no addons too.

[bill]

I find that hard to believe as I find Chrome and Chromium based variants to be much worse performance-wise, but that's my own experience on my setups.YMMV.

You've give us no idea of the OS, hardware and other factors that have gone into your overly generalized observation, so it would be hard to assume you're doing much more than trolling Mozilla with this post.

[tangor]

I remain a FF fan. My adds are rather slim (one for vision, one for video and one to kill Flash LSO cookies). Boots mighty quick and never crashes. Then again I rarely have more than two tabs open at any time.

[birdbrain]

Hi there deuces,

"Is it just me or has Firefox really degraded in quality?"

It is just you. :)


birdbrain

[RedBar]

It happens with a clean install with no addons too.

I built a new Win10 machine last week and I have to agree that initially FF was very slow in comparison to Chrome and Edge to start-up, however a week on and it seems to have settled-in and whilst not quite as quick to start it's doing the business fine and I have loads of tabs open at the same time, 20/30/40 is not at all unusual.

[deuces]

To be clear, I'm not just talking about the speed (which others have noted is a little slower than chrome and edge), it's the overall experience. Like I mentioned about addons needing to restart the browser... in 2016, really? If Chrome can do it seamlessly, it's curious why Firefox can't. Chrome's search tool is just miles ahead of Firefox that is just terrible in comparison. For example, you have to click "highlight all" every time you do a new search when it should be on by default like is on chrome. So many other little things like that.

[bill]

It has been reported for some time that Firefox will be moving to a Chrome extension format [webmasterworld.com...] That will likely stop the requirement to restart the browser for some extension installs.But really, if you're installing so many extensions that a browser restart becomes an issue I think you may have too many extensions...

I leave my machines on 24/7 with the browsers open, so startup time isn't a huge issue for me. I'm not opening and closing browsers all that often. (If my machines aren't running then they're hibernated, so upon opening the browsers are already opened with all my tabs)

So while these issues may be an issue in your work environment, they aren't in mine, and thus I don't see this as an issue of FF degraded quality, but just that your personal preferences lean toward Chrome.

[deuces]

I use firefox with selenium for my python project testing and all those points are a pretty big issue when I'm often opening and closing new browser windows hundreds of times a day, and constantly creating new profile loads where I have to install different add ons among other things.