What's happening with Firefox lately?

Slower and slower with each new release.

[fischermx]

I don't know you but with every release, I feel Firefox is each time slower and slower in rendering. Sometimes now even crashes with pages full of javascript like pageflakes. I guess it is the javascript, what else.

Anyway the rendering thing is getting worse each day, specially with long pages.
Take a look at this example: [asp.net...]
(please don't remove the link, it is a well known website)
Browse it with Firefox and IE. Scroll down using the bars. It flicks with Firefox.

And this other thing is worse. Firefox is each time less multithreading. I remember when I could take a page and open in new tab each link of that page and all pages loaded in the background without a problem. Now, if I click using "open in new tab", I have to wait until the other page is loaded in the background so I can continue working in the same page.

Anyone else suffering this?

[Philosopher]

I can't say I've noticed any of what your seeing. I just tried your test page and it loaded/scrolled with absolutely no issues or flickering.

I regularly load up links in new tabs without any noticeable delay at all.

Are you sure it's not something more to do with your system than FF?

[fischermx]

I have to agree it does not happen immediatly when you open Firefox, but after you have worked with it for some time, let say some hours. When I see the processes firefox has take about 150MB.

Respecting my system is WinXp with a Pentium 4 3.2 HT, with a 256MB nvidia video card.

[asquithea]

Worked fine for me on your example page.

Fx is certainly a bit of a memory hog, but I'd happily trade some memory for the BFCache feature they introduced in 1.5.

[fischermx]

BFCache feature

What exactly is that?

[Philosopher]

I believe he's referring to the Backwards/Forwards Cache [developer.mozilla.org]

[jdMorgan]

Many such problems can be cured with a clean install of Firefox, especially if you did not do a clean install at the Firefox/1.0.7 to Firefox/1.5 transition.

Older extensions and themes can also be a problem, especially if you've overridden the compatibility checking by using the Nightly Tester Tools extension.

If you haven't done so, uninstall Firefox, then reinstall it clean. Your bookmarks and preferences will not be lost by doing so, unless something is seriously wrong with your computing environment (You can make a backup of your profile(s) if you're worried about this).

Jim

[vincevincevince]

I can agree that it is getting slower with each new upgrade. I do hope it doesn't become bloated like Netscape was.

[Skier]

My firefox got slow and crashed constantly a couple of weeks ago. I switched back to explorer for a while and uninstalled firefox.

I reinstalled firefox a few days later, and it has been working nicely ever since. At the time, I thought it might have been "cured" due to the windows updates that had come through the day before I reinstalled.

[MatthewHSE]

Like jdMorgan said, almost all Firefox slowdown issues are due to over-installing. Do a fresh install and a clean profile and you'll have a snappier browser than IE can ever hope to be.