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I switched to Chrome half a year back because Firefox had become sluggish on my Linux box (both Ubuntu and OpenSuse). 6 months later and the problem remains - anyone know what is going on and any tips to improve? I still need to use Firefox occasionally for Firebug.

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Belongs on superuser.com as this is not programming related. More of sysadmin related... – t0mm13b Mar 11 '10 at 1:42
do you have try to launch it with a clean profile? (firefox -p) – fluxtendu Mar 11 '10 at 2:10
Sluggish how? Does it slow down over time? Do websites load slowly? Is the interface unresponsive? There are many different kinds of slowness. – Sasha Chedygov Mar 11 '10 at 7:17
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3 Answers

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For me, performance is the real deal-killer for Firefox nowadays. Compared to Chrome it's just too damn slow*, so I don't think your experiences are unique or imply that something is wrong with your install.

Perhaps a refresh of the codebase for 4.0 might help, until then I, like you, stick to Chrome for 99% of tasks and switch to Firefox for Firebug.

*And not just at the Javascript benchmarks the vendors seem so keen on shoving down our throats, and which I'm almost sure us users couldn't notice the difference in. No, I'm talking about startup time, new tab time, extension load time, the fact that Chrome never expects you to wait while it updates or restarts itself etc. All this downtime together is part of what makes Firefox so 'slow' and unappealing.

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good to know I'm not the only one, and I hope this gets resolved or Chrome gets better developer tools – Richard Mar 16 '10 at 0:29
I found a solution - use abrowser – Richard Apr 23 '10 at 7:58
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Do you periodically clean the firefox internal database? How many extension have you loaded in it? On openSUSE firefox has a long standing issue...see my blog to encounter it.. I have posted the solution there.

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or you could paste at the very least a direct link, or the actual solution here ;) – Journeyman Geek Mar 11 '10 at 11:07
I've allowed myself to add the links to your post, vote you back to zero and also remove the Signature (see the FAQs ;) ). – Bobby Mar 11 '10 at 12:33
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Remove Flash, remove Firefox, reinstall Firefox without Flash. Try again. Any difference?

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What does remove Firefox accomplish? – Bobby Mar 11 '10 at 13:19
In particular, remove the cache and cookies and anything else that piles up in .mozilla/. The less that Firefox has to track the faster it will be. For more info, see the post you edited below. – kmarsh Mar 11 '10 at 20:20
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