this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Firefox has been slower to startup for a long time. Maybe a few seconds slower compared to Chrome. But it has always made up for it in it's memory usage. The more tabs you open, the worse Chrome gets.
@NaoPb Firefox starts in 2 seconds total for me on my 10 years old CPU, even with many plugins installed. While there are constantly 6 or more tabs open, most are not loaded in when starting Firefox, unless I click the tab itself. And opening a new private window is almost instant. I even use Firefox for reading PDFs, instead installing a dedicated application, because it is fast loading and does the job. All in all, it's probably not far away from Chrome in starting up Firefox. And it probably isn't that important, because the browser is open all the time for me.
As for the memory usage, I always thought Firefox is being bad here. Can't imagine Chrome being worse. Are people happy with that?
I remember Chrome starting nearly instantly. But that could be that it's doing some preloading. I haven't used Chrome in years though. 2 seconds for Firefox startup sounds about right yes.
As for memory, I wouldn't say Firefox is great. But I often have a lot of tabs open at once while I am researching some things and Firefox is just rock solid for me. It has had some memory leaks in the past but they seem to be mostly gone now. You'd probably find browsers that use less memory but I dare to question if they would use less memory than Firefox in my usecase.
In an unrelated note I am curious which modern browser (in Linux) uses the fewest amount of memory.
@NaoPb Hi, I just wanted report that the startup of Firefox is almost instant. I have a new modern PC build with a modern and fast M2 SSD and took the exact same Firefox profile over. Now running Firefox starts basically instant. The tabs are not loaded in however, so obviously the webpages would start loading once clicking the tab. But Firefox itself is now instant operation for me.
You are probably right. My memories are of using Firefox on a PC with a mechanical hard drive. Back then Chrome seemed to have the upper hand. But these days Firefox loads instantly when you have an SSD. So yes, please ignore my earlier argument.