When somebody reports a performance problem with Firefox, the first question is always "do you have any add-ons installed" precisely because a lot of them do impact performance significantly. That's not necessarily bad -- e.g. I happily use ABP despite the memory and speed hit -- but there's a reason why it's always the first question.
Having said that, as a Firefox developer I'm sorry that people didn't believe you when you had problems. We're certainly aware that Firefox's performance did compare poorly to Chrome's, which is why numerous performance programs were introduced to fix this difference. MemShrink is the one I started about three years ago: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink. It has resulted in many fixes, both big and small, and it is ongoing. (Indeed, Firefox OS might not have been feasible without it.)
As some others have said, Firefox's performance is a lot better now than it was a couple of years ago. If you want to try it again and you have an old profile hanging around, I suggest that you "Reset Firefox" (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi...) to clear up any lingering problems in that profile. Or you could just create a new profile. If you do try Firefox again, I'd be interested to hear how it goes. Thanks.
Hi Nicholas, I just wanted to say thanks for being the public face of MemShrink. It's really great to have such visibility into this important work in one place, rather than scattered around a bunch of dev blogs etc. Also the continued focus from one person over an extended timeframe really helps get stuff done, from my experience as a PM. Thanks again!
Having said that, as a Firefox developer I'm sorry that people didn't believe you when you had problems. We're certainly aware that Firefox's performance did compare poorly to Chrome's, which is why numerous performance programs were introduced to fix this difference. MemShrink is the one I started about three years ago: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/MemShrink. It has resulted in many fixes, both big and small, and it is ongoing. (Indeed, Firefox OS might not have been feasible without it.)
As some others have said, Firefox's performance is a lot better now than it was a couple of years ago. If you want to try it again and you have an old profile hanging around, I suggest that you "Reset Firefox" (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fi...) to clear up any lingering problems in that profile. Or you could just create a new profile. If you do try Firefox again, I'd be interested to hear how it goes. Thanks.