Firefox Performance Declining

[Octopuss]

I switched to Pale Moon (FF clone/fork) about a year ago and am absolutely happy with it. If you are unhappy with Firefox but don't want to use something drastically different, this might be a browser for you.

[SynthetikHD]

I really want to switch from Chrome to something else, but there is just waaay to many to switch to, so I'm totally clueless.

 

• Chromium
• Comodo Dragon
• Cyberfox
• Firefox Beta
• IceCat
• IceDragon
• Pale Moon
• Waterfox

 

Edit:

• Firefox Developer Edition
• Firefox ESR
• Firefox Nightly
• SeaMonkey

Edited August 30, 2015 by SynthetikHD

[Greg]

Firefox Nightly is nothing more than nightly builds so you might scratch this one off your list.

 

Firefox Beta is nothing more than a beta taken from the nightly builds so you might scratch this one off your list.

 

Firefox Developer Edition is essentially Firefox with a lot of developer tool plugins so you can scratch this one off your list.

 

Firefox ESR is an extended support release of Firefox and is theoretically a more stable release of Firefox with fewer updates. This one should be updated much less frequently than regular Firefox.

 

IceCat is Firefox without the commercial plugins and a GNU license. It may be worth a look if you're into this sort of thing.

 

SeaMonkey is Firefox, email and newsgroup client, RSS/Atom feed reader, HTML editor, IRC chat, and web development tools. This might be a bit much if all you need is a browser.

 

Waterfox is fast... because it's built with the Intel C++ compiler instead of the Microsoft C++ compiler or gcc?

 

This should whittle your list down a bit.

[SynthetikHD]

Updated post. Don't need dev tools and waaay too much stuff in SeaMonkey.

 

Getting updates faster comes with advantages and disadvantages, so not sure about those.

[Greg]

The Firefox nightly builds aren't even guaranteed to work, so take this into consideration. These are primarily intended for testing so cross this one off.

[SynthetikHD]

Updated again.

 

Yes I guess Nightly can be too unstable and it does say it is for testing.

I also took of Firefox ESR as they don't get any updates for a whole year. Definitely don't want that.

[phazer11]

Cyberfox > Waterfox > Pale Moon > Firefox > Torch ~ Chrome 64-bit

​Comodo and it's various flavors would be better if they had more plugin support and such but they're fairly solid.

[SynthetikHD]

I know that Firefox will be 64-bit on September 22nd, so will that basically eliminate Cyberfox/Waterfox/Pale Moon if that's all they do?

 

I also know that Firefox Beta has been 64-bit for quite a while now.

[Octopuss]

so will that basically eliminate Cyberfox/Waterfox/Pale Moon if that's all they do?

 

I suggest you read a little bit before jumping to conclusions. It's definitely not the case of Pale Moon, which is basically a different browser by now.

[SynthetikHD]

Wasn't jumping to conclusions. I've done a lot of reading and everyone has a strong opinion when it comes to web browsers, lol.

 

As far as I can tell, the only substantial differences between Pale Moon and FF are:

• 64-bit
• Uses FF's old UI
• Some extensions don't work

Edited August 30, 2015 by SynthetikHD

[TechAngel85]

That's basically what I got about Pale Moon as well. I've used both Cyberfox and Waterfox before without being particularly impressed.

 

So far my memory usage hasn't climbed so a plugin might be to blame for the high memory usage. I'll give it a few more days of regular use.

[SynthetikHD]

Sorry about kinda derailing the thread from Firefox memory usage to finding out the best browser, Tech. Though maybe if I can figure out which is best you'll switch and not have to worry about it aha. And yeah, I guess I'm not really impressed with Pale Moon or Cyberfox either since there is hardly any performance gain if any at all from 64-bit from what I've looked up, and even less impressed since Firefox is getting 64-bit support really soon.

• Chromium
• Comodo Dragon
• Firefox Beta
• IceCat
• IceDragon
• Waterfox

Potentially remove:

• Cyberfox - 64 bit

 

• Pale Moon

 

Anyone else have any thoughts?

Edited August 31, 2015 by SynthetikHD

[TechAngel85]

I'm cool with it. Stuff like this interests me.

[Octopuss]

 

Wasn't jumping to conclusions. I've done a lot of reading and everyone has a strong opinion when it comes to web browsers, lol.

 

As far as I can tell, the only substantial differences between Pale Moon and FF are:

• 64-bit
• Uses FF's old UI
• Some extensions don't work

 

https://www.palemoon.org/technical.shtml#Firefox_Differences

[SynthetikHD]

Those still seem like the only three noticeable differences. And after looking up Pale Moon some more, I've came across three benchmarks that show Pale Moon was slower than Firefox each time interestingly.

 

Edit:

After spending a lot of time looking up those other Firefox open-source forks, I came to the conclusion that while they are 64-bit, that results in almost no performance gain (because honestly, when is your browser using more than 4GB of ram???) and basically vanilla Firefox outperformed all of them in benchmarks. I'll list a few I saved but I came across a few more I'm too lazy to look up again that said the same thing, Firefox is almost always faster, starts faster, and uses less ram.

 

https://www.softpedia.com/reviews/windows/Cyberfox-Review-470007.shtml

https://www.softpedia.com/reviews/windows/Waterfox-Review-445085.shtml

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2185649/applications/fast-firefox-faceoff--nightly-vs--pale-moon-vs--waterfox.html

https://portableapps.com/node/39509

 

If anyone wants my opinion on the best browser, it's this. If you want speed and good performance, Google Chrome is the way to go if you don't care about Google knowing everything you do.

If you do care about privacy, Firefox Beta is the best because it's stable unlike Firefox Nightly, and you get performance updates and bug fixes a month before all regular Firefox users.

Edited August 31, 2015 by SynthetikHD