Firefox Browser Slowdown

General system Newbie
1

I used to be a long time arch users and after an ubuntu break have tried using endeavour with i3 as my wm.

Everything works great except that firefox starts “lagging”, for lack of better terms, a few dozen minutes after I open it. Typing a single keystroke takes a few seconds, pages load slolwy or not at all, etc.

Chromium, side by side, works just fine. As does vsc, my text editors and my terminal emulators.

I’ve looked into the usual culprits, memory usage, swap usage, cpu, scheduler, cpu power saving settings, graphic drivers and see no smoking gun.

I’m on firefox version 106.0.4-1, which is the latest available afaict. I was previously using firefox on Ubuntu on this same machine and it worked fine.

Any idea for how to fix it or investigate further would be greatly appreciated.

2

Err…not at all.

Name            : firefox
Version         : 107.0.1-1

The version you are on is almost a month out of date.

Try updating your system and if that shows as the latest, resort your mirrors from the welcome application.

3

@dalto I tried setting up a cron to do updates for me, apparently badly since indeed my package were not updated. ups, doing that now and hoping it’ll fix it.

I also noticed disk descryption at startup is very slow (cca 20 seconds) so I tried disabling disk caching for firefox and providing generous amounts of memory to cache, but that didn’t solve it.

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4

Updates on Arch-based distros require manual intervention. You should never try to automate them.

Err…huh? The slow decryption on startup has nothing to do with Firefox. It is because the decryption is happening in grub which has a software-based decryption engine which is sub-optimal.

5

I assume the hard-drive being encrypted might cause a slowdown if it was trying to write a lot of separate files, but I guess not the case

Didn’t know the bit about grub, it’s interesting that it didn’t happen with ubuntu, but I just assumed endevour uses another type of disk encryption and ignored it.

6

Ubuntu probably ships with unencrypted /boot so the decryption is handled by the initram instead of by grub.

7

Sadly enough, after an update to Mozilla Firefox 107.0.1 + killing firefox and restarting it, the lag still persist :frowning:

8

Could be a extension that make your firefox hang. Happen to me multiple time. Try to disable all your extension and see.

9

I tried disabling all extensions (+ killed firefox and restarted) – same lagginess still appears. Also tried turning off webgl rendering and it persisted (but worst, which I’d expect)

10

Did you try with a new created profile ?

firefox -P
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11

It is not a real solution, but I just want to share that I had last week the exact same issue with Firefox on EOS… after having try to resolve the issue (new profile, no extensions, etc…) I ended to replace Firefox with Brave.
Quite happy at the moment. I still have Firefox (didn’t uninstall it) but at the moment I don’t use it.

12

If you used a cron job to perform updates (not recommended for rolling release distros, btw), then perhaps some other out-of-date package is the culprit? Did you perform a full system update and then reboot your machine before testing it again? If your core system packages get updated, you usually need to reboot for the changes to take effect?

If that doesn’t work, then it’s certainly strange, because firefox runs fine on my machine.

13

I use both ff and ff-dev and this happens with either one randomly. It’s been happening for just about a week now for me as well.

And the same as @pierrep56 I just use Brave as a “workaround” of sorts.

I was actually waiting for someone to post about this hoping there’d be a solution because there are only two reasons I don’t use Brave full-time:

  1. support a browser that isn’t based on chromium
  2. auto-scroll in chromium-based browsers doesn’t exist w/o a cumbersome extension

Gonna finally do a Brave Search and see if I can find a solution on the web.

My ff by the way:

image
image730×368 45.8 KB

14

@George3d6 Some users have reported that Firefox’s performance is negatively affected by a built-in extension called Pocket. You can try disabling Pocket and see if it helps.

Open Firefox and type about:config in the address bar. A warning page may appear by default, so you have to click “Accept the Risk and Continue”. Once you’re in the config page, search for extensions.pocket.enabled and set the toggle to false.

P/S: I never use Pocket and quite frankly consider it bloatware. I do not understand why Firefox’s developers chose to have Pocket built into Firefox.

15

Now Brave is also giving a problem where it randomly crashes when I select words on a page. That’s really weird. Is this a boogle attack?

16

Just thought I would share my experience with distro’s and browsers over the last couple weeks.

1st off, I tried several different distro’s, I installed them on my PC and was not using a virtual machine. I had problems with Firefox starting slow regardless of the version, even tried downgrading but that didn’t help either. On EndeavourOS on a fresh install and a fresh Firefox install with nothing setup, regardless of what the start page address was set to the startup time was really slow, I got the same results with other browsers also that I tried.

So I tried ArcoLinux and had the same results. Seems like Microsoft Edge Beta loaded okay but the other browsers were slow to start that I tried, from Brave to Vivaldi, Chromium etc…

So I thought I would try Peppermint Linux Debian based with the Firefox-ESR, that give me the same results having a really slow startup.

In the end I installed Linux Mint Ubuntu and for some odd reason Firefox and other browsers I have tried are super fast to startup.

I never had that problem with Arch Based or Debian based distro’s until the last few weeks. I’m wondering if it might be a library file change or network update change or something along those lines that is causing the issue as it seems to be related to more than just one browser or Firefox in my case.

Like I said the issues seemed to be occurring with all browsers except for Microsoft Edge Beta on the distro’s I tried. But even at that MSE Beta on a few distro’s was slow to start also.

Hopefully there will be a solution to this soon. I prefer to run an Arch based system like EndeavourOS but the slow browser start is a problem for me.

I have a lot of Websites where I have them setup using Peppermint ICE SSB software, it comes in real handy for several things. For example, I can create a Radar website SSB with ice-dev and add UBlock to it to block all the ads in it, then I create a script to launch it with adding wmctrl to set the size of the window and have xdotool automatically click the play button to animate the radar, lot of sites force you to click a button to do that, with my script I just create a taskbar link and click it once and everything is automated. Hope I explained that right.

Just to add to that, I also tried different graphics card driver versions to see if that would fix anything but it didn’t. Right now I am on Nvidia GPU Driver 525.60.11 which I tried on all except the Peppermint Debian distro and had the same problems. On Linux Mint I’m not having those issues.

Just thought I would mention this in case it might help someone come up with a solution to the problem.

17

strange . it open instant here ( around 3sec ) i can live with that

18

I know this is an old topic, but I finally found out what the issue is and how to fix it. Sorry if this is something already mentioned on the forums here to the Mods of this forum, I felt it’s worth mentioning.

Anyway, I am currently on a regular Arch install where I installed everything myself instead of using a distro. . I would have kept using EndeavourOS had I known then what I know now. I tried multiple distro’s, at one point I was on Linux Mint Ubuntu version and the problem did not affect it, but I prefer Arch and had the problem come back again once switching to Arch distro’s. So I thought I would go back to Linux Mint Ubuntu, but the problem was there also at that point.

The problem was not only Firefox, but also Handrake, Thunderbird taking well over 30 seconds to start. So on this install that I am currently using I went one by one trying to track it down. I thought I had it figured out, because I was testing Firefox Handbrake and Thunderbird with each install. Then I installed Flatpak, that’s when I noticed the slowdown for all 3 apps I was testing.

At this point I done some searching around and found that the problem was an update to xdg-desktop-portal-gnome , for whatever reason it was causing it.

This may have already been fixed with current EndeavorOS installs so my apologies if it is a non-issue for EndeavorOS, but it is an issue for multiple distro’s.

Link to thread for the fix scroll down toward the bottom but I will include instructions also:

The fix was to install : dbus-broker
and
sudo systemctl enable --global dbus-broker.service
then
sudo systemctl enable dbus-broker.service

May need to reboot, I rebooted after doing so just to be sure and it worked for me.

After doing this Firefox Handbrake & Thunderbird start right away with no delay at all.

Either way, I wanted to come back and let others know my experience with the issue and the cause and the cure. Perhaps this will be fixed sometime in the near future, I have no idea but this was the remedy for me.

And I should NOTE : I mentioned Firefox HandBrake & Thunderbird, this more than likely was what was affecting other browsers I tried earlier in the thread also.

Hope this helps someone.

2 Likes
19

Hello Bobcat,

your solution works for me too!
I use eos-cassini. I have a slow booting Firefox and also the Documentviewer starts slowly. So I do, what anthony93 said:

Open Firefox and type about:config in the address bar. 
A warning page may appear by default, 
so you have to click “Accept the Risk and Continue”. 
Once you’re in the config page, 
search for extensions.pocket.enabled and set the toggle to false.

And then I followed your instructions:

The fix was to install : dbus-broker
and
sudo systemctl enable --global dbus-broker.service
then
sudo systemctl enable dbus-broker.service

Now Firefox boots as I know it from earlier eos-Installations and The Documentviewer works fine too!

Thanks

EOZ :smile: :wink: :smile:

2 Likes
20

Glad that it helped, but I can’t take credit for it, the people in the link figured it out. Thanks for the tip on pocket, I have it disabled in settings, but it never hurts to do it in about:config also.

Edited to say WOW! Your tip at least for me about disabling Pocket in about:config seems to have really helped speed FIrefox up even more. No doubt that it has made a difference. Even though you turn pocket off in settings, apparently that just is not enough to disable it, your tip is great! Thank You! :grinning:

1 Like