[CodeWriter23]

My choice to dump Firefox has absolutely nothing to do with Eich's termination. Or his comments.

Firefox on the Mac has gotten increasingly slower for me, since about version 28. Version 36 is when it became absolutely intolerable, where the pinwheel pauses during navigating to a new page or opening a new tab achieved a duration of 10 - 30 seconds. I could handle 1-2 seconds. Even 3-5 seconds was annoying but not enough to get me to stop using Firefox. Version 36 did it for me. Some may have a lower threshold for pain than I, and exited earlier.

Yes, I disabled ALL of my add-ons, which consisted of Firebug and ABP, and while the performance improved slightly, it still exceeded the 5-second annoyance barrier all too often. I finally gave up and started using Chrome, which BTW, runs like a banshee even with ABP installed.

[sjwright]

To add another data point, I'm using Firefox on the Mac with a half dozen plug-ins and I have never experienced pauses remotely like what you describe.

Furthermore, Firefox has been consistently smoother than my near-virgin install of Chrome. It's weird -- while Chrome definitely finishes loading pages a bit faster, it performs incomplete page repaints in the process, causing unpleasant whole-of-screen flashes as I jump from page to page. With Firefox, moving from page to page is butter smooth.

[rangibaby]

Do Apple diagnostics, someone at our company was having problems specifically with Firefox. It turned out to be a bad stick of RAM.

[song]

That's interesting, I've switched back to Firefox because Chrome was getting slower and currently for my usage (I tend to have 100+ tabs open) under Yosemite, Firefox wins hands down compared to Safari and Chrome.

I thought that they've improved a lot in recent times whereas Chrome has become more and more bloated...

[TazeTSchnitzel]

That doesn't sound normal. Are you sure your system is working properly?