[asr]

On the one hand, this seems like a real missed opportunity by Mozilla. As Chrome reigns in extensions that conflict with Google's business model, this is a reason to use Firefox.

BUT - extensions are also often the cause of a slow and frustrating Firefox experience, which then leads folks to talk about how Chrome is better-performing/faster (I've been guilty of this myself in the past). Mozilla needs to make sure Firefox is keeping pace with Chrome, which they've presumably decided means de-emphasizing extensions.

That said, not sure why Mozilla needs to de-emphasize donation buttons.

[zaat]

>BUT - extensions are also often the cause of a slow and frustrating Firefox experience, which then leads folks to talk about how Chrome is better-performing/faster

IE (used to?) have this bottom notification warning about 'X plugin is slowing IE, would you like to disable it?'. Perhaps Firefox should add similar feature and notify users about slow plugins, maybe even with some actual data instead of a vague slowness claim.

[uponcoffee]

Mozilla does this already, to a degree. Using the Dark Reader extension hangs some sites for several seconds and Mozilla asks me if I'd like to kill it

[pteraspidomorph]

Your extensions are listed along with their resource usage in about:performance !

[liability]

Which browser extension is responsible for making Firefox slow as a slug when deleting large numbers history entries?

I've not checked the source, but my guess is firefox stores the history in a SQLite db and when you select 500 history items then delete them, it's doing 500 DELETEs, maybe even without a proper index. It's seriously slow.

There seems to be a lot of low hanging fruit in Firefox, but not being employed by Mozilla I don't particularly feel like my thoughts or contributions are welcome. The last time reported a bug on bugzilla.mozilla.org (which is a pain in the neck) I was told that accessibility on MacOS wasn't important enough for Mozilla to care about (paraphrasing.)

[yoklov]

I think it’s not 500 deletes, but it’s certainly not great. There is definitely an index. If you can repro this, you should file a bug for it, I’ve noticed it being slow too, but couldn’t repro it recently. If you file a bug for this, you can CC me (tcsc at mozilla dot com).

[jhasse]

> BUT - extensions are also often the cause of a slow and frustrating Firefox experience

I doubt that this is true. Some extensions like Adblockers even make browsing faster.

[NeedMoreTea]

For a demonstration install Dark Reader on an ageing or budget machine. It can render Chrome sluggish and frustrating and Firefox almost unusable.

There's a fair few others that can upset Firefox but never seem to be the same extent of annoyance for Chrome.

[hestipod]

I reset Firefox recently on an ancient Linux laptop and before I got uBlock origin set back up the browser was nearly unusable. I had taken for granted how much it was doing. If I ever get out of this deep financial hole I am sending gorhill a large donation (if he accepts, I recall in the past he wasn't taking any). One of the most, if not THE most useful QOL add-ons in my view.

[swozey]

Dark Reader which is one of my must-haves has a known Firefox performance issue on a LOT of sites that makes Firefox almost unusable for me, so I recently begrudgingly switched back to Chrome.

https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader/issues/535

[kenhwang]

LastPass makes the browser slower and sometimes even locks up the tab. It definitely does happen.

[mevile]

> extensions are also often the cause of a slow and frustrating Firefox experience

You have any recent data on this? I am not convinced this is true anymore.

[pluma]

This used to be a problem with legacy extensions because their APIs pre-dated the multi-process effort and forced Firefox into single-process mode.

In over a year of using Firefox every day I haven't noticed any slowdowns after Firefox made the move to drop compatibility for those extensions.

[kijin]

Extensions rarely cause slowness. Plugins (e.g. Flash) do.

[newsreview1]

I agree, 100% - missed opportunity for Mozilla.

[tomc1985]

Statements like this make me long for the days where extensability and customizability reigned supreme