Firefox painfully slow whereas Chrome is fast
Hi all,
Am running LMDE 2, fully up-to-date and using Firefox 50.0.2 but Firefox has been really painfully slow for a while now - it's so slow to start, slow to scroll a page even with only one tab open, and takes a minute to type out a full word. I've tried starting Firefox in safe mode, completely deleting my user profile and starting fresh, used "apt-get remove --purge" and then reinstalling firefox.... and still stupidly slow. Chrome is speedy, starts up fast, can run 20+ tabs without a slow-down in performance, no problem at all.
And my laptop is no slouch - it's 3 years old, has a quad core i7 processor, 8GB RAM and a Quadro video card. I also run LMDE 2 and all apps from a 256GB SSD card. The home directory is on a 500GB SATA hard drive, however. So I do expect better performance from Firefox so there must be something wrong - I'd really appreciate it if someone can give me some pointers as to what could be wrong please?
Here's the output from inxi:
[CODE]System: Host: voyager Kernel: 3.16.0-4-amd64 x86_64 (64 bit gcc: 4.8.4)
Desktop: MATE 1.16.1 (Gtk 3.14.5+4) Distro: LinuxMint 2 betsy
Machine: System: Dell product: Precision M4600 v: 01
Mobo: Dell model: 08V9YG v: A00 Bios: Dell v: A16 date: 12/26/2013
CPU: Quad core Intel Core i7-2760QM (-HT-MCP-) cache: 6144 KB
flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx) bmips: 19157
Clock Speeds: 1: 632 MHz 2: 626 MHz 3: 639 MHz 4: 630 MHz
5: 612 MHz 6: 615 MHz 7: 612 MHz 8: 609 MHz
Graphics: Card: NVIDIA GF108GLM [Quadro 1000M] bus-ID: 01:00.0
Display Server: X.Org 1.16.4 driver: nvidia Resolution: 1920x1080@59.91hz GLX Renderer: Quadro 1000M/PCIe/SSE2 GLX Version: 4.4.0 NVIDIA 340.96 Direct Rendering: Yes
Audio: Card-1 NVIDIA GF108 High Definition Audio Controller
driver: snd_hda_intel bus-ID: 01:00.1
Card-2 Intel 6 Series/C200 Series Family High Definition Audio Controller
driver: snd_hda_intel bus-ID: 00:1b.0
Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture v: k3.16.0-4-amd64
Network: Card-1: Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300
driver: iwlwifi v: in-tree: bus-ID: 03:00.0
IF: wlan0 state: up mac: <filter>
Card-2: Intel 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection
driver: e1000e v: 2.3.2-k port: 8040 bus-ID: 00:19.0
IF: eth0 state: down mac: <filter>
Drives: HDD Total Size: 756.2GB (50.4% used)
ID-1: /dev/sdb model: TOSHIBA_THNSNH25 size: 256.1GB
ID-2: /dev/sda model: ST9500423AS size: 500.1GB
Partition: ID-1: / size: 20G used: 6.1G (33%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sdb2
ID-2: /home size: 385G used: 349G (96%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda2
Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 50.0C mobo: N/A gpu: 0.0:45C
Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: N/A
Info: Processes: 248 Uptime: 9 min Memory: 1215.4/7959.8MB
Init: SysVinit runlevel: 2 Gcc sys: 4.9.2
Client: Shell (bash 4.3.301) inxi: 2.1.28/CODE
All Replies (2)
Hello,
Certain Firefox problems can be solved by performing a Clean reinstall. This means you remove your Firefox program files and then reinstall Firefox. This process does not remove your Firefox profile data (such as bookmarks and passwords), since that information is stored in a different location.
To do a clean reinstall of Firefox, please follow these steps: Note: You might want to print these steps or view them in another browser.
- Download the latest Desktop version of Firefox from mozilla.org (or choose the download for your operating system and language from this page) and save the setup file to your computer.
- After the download finishes, close all Firefox windows (or open the Firefox menu
and click the close button 
).
- Delete the Firefox installation folder, which is located in one of these locations, by default:
- Windows:
- C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox
- C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox
- Mac: Delete Firefox from the Applications folder.
- Linux: If you installed Firefox with the distro-based package manager, you should use the same way to uninstall it - see Install Firefox on Linux. If you downloaded and installed the binary package from the Firefox download page, simply remove the folder firefox in your home directory.
- Windows:
- Now, go ahead and reinstall Firefox:
- Double-click the downloaded installation file and go through the steps of the installation wizard.
- Once the wizard is finished, choose to directly open Firefox after clicking the Finish button.
More information about reinstalling Firefox can be found here.
WARNING: Do not use a third party uninstaller as part of this process. Doing so could permanently delete your Firefox profile data, including but not limited to, extensions, cache, cookies, bookmarks, personal settings and saved passwords. These cannot be easily recovered unless they have been backed up to an external device! See Back up and restore information in Firefox profiles.
Please report back to say if this helped you!
Thank you.
Hello,
Already have done that - no luck. I've already deleted the profile as well, did an "apt-get remove --purge firefox" to delete all settings, everything - still the same. I just started Firefox for the second time and it pops up that "Firefox seems... slow... to.... start".