Since we're all here to complain about Firefox, I want to add that at this point I'm a firefox user out of principle, but I swear I get so many weird performance issues with firefox on ubuntu that it feels like self-flagellation in service of the gods of the free and open Internet.
Unfortunately they're the kinds of problems that are really hard to submit tickets for: gradual degradation of performance over the course of a week until I kill the process and start it again, the occasional crash that I can't seem to associate with anything in particular, a bizarre bug where every once in a while firefox slows down and typing letters into any input field has a ~30 second delay...
I've never cared about AI or Pocket or anything like that, I just want firefox to be reliably snappy. And I really, really don't want a browser ecosystem dominated by two for-profit companies.
I've been a Firefox user since it launched (and a Netscape Navigator user before that). In addition to Desktop, I use Firefox on iOS with my 3-year old iPad Pro, which of late exhibits the same sluggishness that you describe after a while. It goes away if I force restart, but not if I just close tabs.
I speculate that it has to do with keeping alive closed pages. Something related that I first started noticing a few months ago is that if I mistime the closing of a YouTube tab, the sound will keep playing and the only way to stop it is to force quit the app.
I haven't noticed the issue on Firefox Desktop, but my MacBook Pro is reasonably beefy and maybe that helps.
I've become increasingly aggravated with a browser that has propagandized since its creation that it is meant to give its users control over their web experience that the processes/workers that tabs and extensions start are almost completely opaque, or only accessible through bizarre about:pages that are themselves inaccessible by extensions, and only give you often unintelligible information about random unidentified groups of processes at the thread level.
There is no technical reason that I can figure out that there can't be a commandline top-like for Firefox that keeps up with every worker started up by a tab or extension; or for that matter logs every use of a granted permission by an extension; or of course to manage cookies, local storage, and memory allocations, and allows you to set alerts for them, block them, kill them, etc..
I've been bullying AI into constructing a minimal architecture that would do just that, and not touch much in order to keep it easy to maintain the fork. If anybody else has or knows of an existing solution, I'm all ears. If the browser is supposed to be an OS now, why is the one that claims to be free also a monolith with no process control?
Firefox just decided around the time they got rid of the ability to easily disable js that they wanted the web to be impenetrable magic. I decided that their motive is that they didn't want you touching their bosses' ads, or their strange experiments.
I'm selfish. If firefox has been pinning a core at 100% for the last hour, I'm greedy enough to want to know what tab is doing it (especially if it is a long-closed tab that left behind a little gift, could it be?) I know it's not my place.
I've definitely noticed this on desktop. Discarding all tabs doesn't really fix the issue, I have to go to `about:profiles` every couple of days and restart firefox to get the navigation sluggishness to go away.
That last delay bit might not be a Firefox bug but rather something in the Debian/Ubuntu stack. I get that same type of freeze up about once a week. I typically have FF open but it can happen while I’m working in something else.
In my case I’ve chalked it up to running Debian on a MS Surface device. I’m using the standard kernel though since the Surface kernel only adds touchscreen for my device and I don’t really want it.
Unfortunately they're the kinds of problems that are really hard to submit tickets for: gradual degradation of performance over the course of a week until I kill the process and start it again, the occasional crash that I can't seem to associate with anything in particular, a bizarre bug where every once in a while firefox slows down and typing letters into any input field has a ~30 second delay...
I've never cared about AI or Pocket or anything like that, I just want firefox to be reliably snappy. And I really, really don't want a browser ecosystem dominated by two for-profit companies.