It pains me to say, but I'd rather Mozilla used all their man-power to fix the god-awful performance of desktop Firefox.
Granted, I have a lot of pages and tabs open, more than 20 at any given time. But I fail to understand why that leads to such a dramatic slow-down after having the browser open for a day or two. If I type text, it will appear with a delay of up to 20s - on a 16GB computer where a lot of RAM is free. And with only uBlock.
Something in the core of Firefox is completely rotten.
> I have a lot of pages and tabs open, more than 20 at any given time.
20 tabs is shockingly low for causing performance problems, especially that severe and _especially_ on a computer with freaking 16 GB of RAM. I abuse tabs pretty badly on Chrome: on my 16 GB workstation I'd have a few hundred open, many of them for weeks at a time, and on my 8 GB laptop, I usually have up to 100, and I rarely get performance problems, certainly never to that degree.
I was one of the late-switchers to Chrome because there were some Firefox features I enjoyed, but the garbage performance finally forced my hand back in 2009/10 or whatever. I periodically check back with Firefox out of a healthy sense of wanting to be aware of alternatives, but it consistently fails at what's perhaps the most important to me: performance.
I currently have 1290tabs in the tab bar, about ~40 of them loaded with memory usage around 2GB for the whole browser without noticing any issues.
My most CPU intensive extensions are Stylish @ 3%, µUblock @ 2%, and All Tabs Helper @ 1%. For tabs it's about:performance @ 22%, a YouTube video @ 6%, and a paused YouTube video @ 2%.
This is with Nightly (binary downloaded from Mozilla) on a 4core 3.7GHz AMD CPU, with an integrated 8core GPU: the A10-7850K running Gentoo Linux.
No, I have Flash disabled, both on Windows and on MacOS. Developer tools are a resource drain, but bearable - the browser simply gets slower after a couple of hours of use. And then much slower, like unbearably slow, even the developer edition where I don't have uBlock or any script/flash/adblocker installed.
Granted, I have a lot of pages and tabs open, more than 20 at any given time. But I fail to understand why that leads to such a dramatic slow-down after having the browser open for a day or two. If I type text, it will appear with a delay of up to 20s - on a 16GB computer where a lot of RAM is free. And with only uBlock.
Something in the core of Firefox is completely rotten.