[barrkel]

I don't recognize your experience of Firefox in my own.

I use tree style tabs, so I have lots of tabs open - after a cleanup this morning, I still have 26, but 50 to 100 is far from unusual - and it's just as fast as ever to open new tabs. I don't notice the memory usage at all. Sure, browsers are all the biggest hogs - Chrome, Firefox, Slack - but with 16G in my work laptop there's no noticeable difference than with my home machine with 32G.

I don't use Chrome much beyond development testing, but with some features - anything with smooth animations in particular - I see way more CPU usage from it than FF.

[Silhouette]

I don't use Chrome much beyond development testing, but with some features - anything with smooth animations in particular - I see way more CPU usage from it than FF.

Just to add another data point, this has also been my experience: Firefox since Quantum often pegs CPU cores at 100% when showing pages with even quite simple animations.

The other big trouble area since Quantum seems to be extensions. After various experiments of my own and various discussions online, it seems clear that the machines I use where there are more extensions involved are much less stable and much more vulnerable to problems generally than those with mostly vanilla Firefox installations.

[tobias3]

Yeah, one needs to check those extensions one by one for performance problems. My performance problems with Firefox went away when I uninstalled Ghostery a while back.

Firefox is doing a good job about analysing extensions startup performance, but I guess they need to do the same thing for page loads and memory usage. Or integrate the extension functionality into core more.

[Silhouette]

It seems to me that extensions used to be more integrated and the goal of the new model is, as much as anything, to separate and encapsulate them more. In theory, that should help with security and stability issues.

Unfortunately in practice what's happened so far is that lots of useful little things aren't possible any more because the new API doesn't support them, while extensions are evidently still capable of causing problems with performance and stability anyway.

Hopefully both of these aspects will improve in time. In particular, the emphasis on personalisation and improving the extensions ecosystem in this roadmap is welcome and seems very much in keeping with what a lot of us used to like about Firefox. I hope they really do put their focus there and exercise caution on becoming too "opinionated".