Firefox Performance 3 vs 4?

[Flybye]

Have any of you noticed a huge decrease in performance when going from Firefox 3 to 4?

I only have a mini with a 1.83 C2D and 2gb of ram running 10.6.7. It's not much but should it be enough for a browser to bog down?

Things were super smooth with 3 but when I went to 4, I noticed a significant amount of lag. I mean bad enough to where if I were switching from 1 tab to another, I'd see the beach ball spinning! It was really horrible and I ended up moving back to 3. I deleted 4 and reinstalled, but same thing.

 

[Repo]

Firefox 4 doesn't play nice with OSX, though that's mostly Apple's fault. The main problem is with Flash. I'd wait for a few more FF updates and see how it goes.

 

[Flybye]

Ah okay thx. Guess I'll wait till 4 gets a little more mature.

 

[tshort]

There are also Java issues. For example WebEx doesn't work unless you force FireFox into 32-bit mode.

 

[mutchy126]

Like and Dislike It!

I like and Dislike It,

Advantage: Its faster and has a nicer design

Disadvantage: A lot of Add-ons from Firefox 3 are incompatible

 

[Repo]

There are also Java issues. For example WebEx doesn't work unless you force FireFox into 32-bit mode.

Silverlight also requires 32-bit mode as of now.

 

[ratzzo]

I used to have FF 3 but when I upgraded to 4 I find it.. sluggish? I changed to Chrome, which is just as fast as FF4 should have been. Simply put, it doesn't run smooth. It also forces you to enable nvidia gpu on my MBP, and I can't even change it through gfxcardstatus. On Chrome, I can.

 

[jive turkey]

I always have a very sluggish firefox for a day or two after major upgrades, but then it seems to catch up for whatever odd reason. The only problem I am having now is that since the Mac PDF plugin hasn't been updated, I can't access a few pdf files from banking sites because they download a blank page instead of the pdf file. Srange. No problem in Safari though, thankfully.

 

[dyn]

Silverlight also requires 32-bit mode as of now.

No it does not. Silverlight, Flash and Java work fine in 64 bit Firefox 4. You need to update them to work properly since older versions have difficulty with 64 bit webbrowsers (on any platform).

The problem a lot of people have is called upgrading. Going from Fx3 to Fx4 is quite a big step since you skipped 3.5 and 3.6. Also there are the usual problems when upgrading any piece of software to a newer version. First try if you have the same problems with a different profile or even a different user (whatever is easier for you to setup/use). If that works out fine you could try disabling all the extensions and see if it improves things. If it does then procede to enable the extensions one by one to pinpoint the problem.

@jive turkey: there have been several issues filed for that plugin. If you follow one of them (I think it is #159) you'll see that some people have changed the code a bit to get it to work in Fx4. The only problem is that it will only work in the 32 bit version. Fx4 requires extensions to be 64 bit as well so the extension needs to be rewritten. The only problem with that is that Mozilla is planning to built a pdf viewer into Fx5. Don't count on the plugin to be developed any further, it just seems pointless.

@tshort: WebEx is Cisco stuff, it hardly surprises me that it doesn't work (their ios is a real PITA)...

 

[MBP13]

I'm running Firefox 4 and I think it's OK. I haven't really seen that much of a speed increase, though. The only problem I'm having with Firefox 4 is that quite often, when I go to click a tab, I can't click it and it freezes up, and the only way to undo it is by force quitting Firefox. Hopefully this issue will be resolved later on.

 

[Repo]

No it does not. Silverlight... work fine in 64 bit Firefox 4.

I see you are correct. Silverlight never came back with updates, but I checked the website, and was able to go from 4.0.5 to 4.0.6. Strange it didn't pick up the update automatically.

 

[SaSaSushi]

I'm using Firefox 4 as my default. I, too, didn't notice a night and day difference in terms of speed from FF3 but it seems snappier. It is quite stable though. I find that when problems do happen on FF they tend to be extension problems or incompatibilities.

One problem I was having was that App Tabs were not persisting after shutting down and restarting FF. I installed the awesome Tab Mix Plus extension and protected them though and now all's fine.