Firefox 50 delayed a week: ships with noticeable startup improvements
Mozilla Firefox 50, the next release version of the web browser, won't come out on November 8, 2016 but a week later on November 15, 2016 instead.
Firefox ESR will be released a week later as well to come out at the same day as Firefox 50.
The reason for the change is quite positive for users of the web browser: Mozilla wants to include improvements made to the browser's startup in Firefox 50.
Firefox 50 is the last feature release of 2016; Mozilla plans to release Firefox 50.0.1 in December but won't include any new features in that release as it s the typical year's end release.
A recent bug listing on Bugzilla@Mozilla describes Firefox's add-on SDK module system as a performance disaster. Mozilla engineers managed to identify several performance related issues caused by the module system.
Some of the issues found were that .js files were evaluated each time they are required even if they have been evaluated already, that readURI is slow and called a lot, and that the system uses a lot of modules.
Fixes for some issues were created quickly, and are already part of all development versions of the Firefox browser (Beta, Developer, Nightly).
Preliminary tests have shown that the improvements may shave off seconds of Firefox's startup time. The improvement depends largely on the number of installed add-ons, but Firefox installations without any add-ons benefit from the fixes as well.
While mileage may vary, one developer was able to reduce the startup time by 65% or 2.5 seconds with the three add-ons Test Pilot, Activity Stream and Tab Center installed. The same developer noticed an improvement of 35% or 0.3 seconds on a Firefox installation without any add-ons installed.
In a profile without addons, total time in require() + Cu.import during startup has gone down by 35%, from 805ms to 524ms.
In a profile with Test Pilot, Activity Stream and Tab Center, the total time spent in require() and Cu.import during startup has gone down by 65%, from 3844ms to 1320ms.
Firefox users who notice long startup times may see improvements with the release of Firefox 50. This may be true especially if several (SDK) add-ons are installed and enabled.
Coincidentally, Mozilla noticed a huge test run improvement as tests used to complete in about 30 minutes or 63 minutes prior to the changes, and now in 15 minutes and 37 minutes instead.
Closing Words
Faster startup time is always a good thing especially if it is noticeable by the user. While I never had issues with Firefox's startup performance, I know of several Firefox users who are experience a bad startup performance. (via Sören Hentzschel)
Now You: How is the startup of your browser?
I suspect all Fx devs now have SSD disks so they dont even suspect that something is wrong with startup time :)
Hello there,
The start-up time is especially longer when e10s is enabled in fact. I have reported a bug similar to the above one :
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1301392
:o)
Hm 50b11 on my system is twice slow than Opera 42developer in startup (firefox is much slower in 1st startup;slow disk?).
Both are 64bit. Opera loads google page with internal blocker in less than 5s. In firefox i use ublock origin and flash blocker.
System is:
Operating System
Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
CPU
AMD Sempron 3850 (4 cores on 1,3GHz)
Kabini 28nm Technology
RAM
4.00 GB Single-Channel DDR3 (11-11-12-28)
Motherboard
ASUS AM1M-A (FS1b )
Graphics
Standard Monitor (1920×1080@32Hz)
ATI AMD Radeon HD 8200 / R3 Series (ASUStek Computer Inc)
HD:
ModelSAMSUNG HD322GJ, 320GB, 7200RPM
About startup
Add-on Update Checker
Classic Theme Restorer
Cookie Controller
Distill Web Monitor
Feed Sidebar
FindBar Tweak
FireGestures
Googleâ„¢ Translator
Greasemonkey
Hide Caption Titlebar Plus
OmniSidebar
Open Tabs Next to Current
Self-Destructing Cookies
uBlock Origin
YouTube High Definition
YouTube Video and Audio Downloader
Linux Mint 17.3 KDE
FirstPaint is reported on both to be around 5s.
Real startup time on
49.0.2: 17 seconds! (14 seconds of blank white window)
51.0a2: 7 seconds.
“The same developer noticed an improvement of 35% or 0.3 seconds”
and for that, he’s now enjoying his fifteen minutes of non-obscurity
^ eh… why the hell would anyone have 700 tabs open?
personally i don’t care about starting time, as firefox stays open for up to 4 days each time.
FF 50 works fine here so far, i switched directly from ESR 45 because FF 50 performs way better in youtube here. FF 51+ seems to do even better, but there is some memory leak. with the same profile/addons the “private bytes” used by firefox.exe do increase…. and increase… usually after 3 hours they are up between 1.5GB and 2GB.
not sure if it’s really a firefox issue or some addon, but as said, the same profile works fine in FF 50, “private bytes” are around 600 – 900MB, even after days of usage.
This is good news. It is important to note, however, that how Mozilla measures Firefox “startup time” seems to be meaningless. Looking at the health report data, Firefox is claiming it is starting in under 4 seconds. But in actuality, the browser, with all of its extensions, is not fully loaded and operating for over 25 seconds.
The Firefox toolbar continues to have extension buttons slowly appear during that 25+ seconds.
One problem is uBlock Origin, which takes a very long time to load. Although that particular toolbar button appears quickly, any websites that are opened before uBlock Origin is fully loaded are not properly filtered by its rules.
@Tony. Suggestion… if you start up the browser with multiple tabs and ‘things’ aren’t being filtered for a few seconds, use a small hosts file. On my computers, with the way my browsers are configured, rarely if ever does the hosts file actually do anything. On my mobile devices the hosts file makes a huge difference. Hosts file is optimized, checked for duplicates, has 15,000 entries and is 311KB in size. I would post a link to a copy on dropbox but I suspect doing that would cause this post to end up in the twilight zone. ;)
> One problem is uBlock Origin, which takes a very long time to load.
uBO itself loads quite fast given what it has to do[1]. However an extension loads only when the browser launches it, and the browser does not wait for an extension to be ready before loading tabs.
[1] See “setup time” graph @ https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Launch-and-filter-lists-load-performance and keep in mind this is old data, there has been more performance improvements since then for the loading of filter lists (for example: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases/tag/1.9.8)
@Gorhill
200ms is quite low indeed, but it could get worse on a profile with many add-ons and many filters. For such profiles, couldn’t uBlock optionally block all network requests until it’s ready to filter them ? I think “hard mode” users wouldn’t mind. It would still miss requests that occur before uBlock is even launched, but there shouldn’t be that many.
Either way is good for my personal egoistic needs; thanks a ton for making that add-on and µMatrix :)
—–
Historically, unlike Chrome Firefox add-ons *could* block early network requests. There was only some edge cases related to async disk reads but you could safely open Firefox on a website and have it filtered by ABP just fine. It’s not the case nowadays, even ABP’s please_kill_startup_performance option is not good. I don’t think there is any adblocker left that does the trick, so it’s the fastest to start and parse its rules that wins.
I don’t know if this tradeoff is due to the evolution of Firefox startup routines, or just the switch from XUL/XPCOM add-on to SDK/WebExtensions. Either way the workaround is to have no tab loaded on browser startup, only on demand.
That’s exactly the problem. The browser allows tabs to be loaded before uBlock Origin is actually ready (and it takes a while until it is actually ready). As a result, nothing gets blocked. This results in unwanted connections to hosts that should be blocked.
And let’s not forget the cache which, heavily loaded, impacts the start-up time, as well as the history if I remember correctly.
@Tony
It’s the case for Adblock Plus for sure, but I didn’t know uBlock Origin had the same feature/issue. Chrome has this as well.
Either way this is the add-on developer’s choice: “Let the browser start up and get ready for browsing; don’t make it wait for me” is the idea.
To avoid potential privacy leaks what I do is make sure tabs from the previous session aren’t loaded on startup. The tab I close Firefox on is not one that makes network requests. (It’s a pinned tab at chrome://ublock0/content/logger-ui.html#tab_bts)
Tony, I have 75 add-ons, FF is fully operational 15-20 seconds from launch and uBlockO is one of the first add-ons to be be active. No idea what your OS is but here it’s FF (45.0.2) 64-BIT on Windows 7 64-BIT
@ PantsHunt42,
“Still, was a great exercise in making you think you were doing something wrong/different xD Soz, my bad :)”
You prefer to be naughty then absent-minded then?! Well, I can’t believe it was intentional :)
Ah… I feel better. I can drop the investigations, bring back my rented Dick Tracy suit and put the plastic Colt45 back in the shoe box. I’ll always be a dreamer, not naive but I tend to believe those who have proven to be skilled!
Thanks for this most valuable information!
@ Parker, I was just notified by an email of your last comment in response to mine but strangely that comment doesn’t appear here … where you wrote :
—
“The difference could also be your session. Maybe yours is bigger with lots of tabs ? That counts, even if tabs aren’t loaded.
Regarding add-on non-obvious incompatibilities, AMO’s reviews are manual so that should cut down on the number of hiccups involving at least one popular add-on. But you have many rare ones, so it’s a possibility. On the other hand if they don’t do much, there are less chances that they will collide.
And FINALLY you confessed about some of your add-ons! I was expecting a couple of nice suggestions from it, that’s why I’ve been curious, and sounds like Scrapbook X is definitely worth a try :)
Although it is going to have a hard time becoming compatible with multi-process, let alone WebExtensions. I guess I shouldn’t rely on it for more than a week’s worth of stuff until its future is more defined.”
—
Hum.
I don’t keep sessions, should I exceptionally that I’d use ‘TabMixPlus’ tool for that. I always start FF with a clean cache, no history and ‘Mozilla Firefox Start Page’ only …
My FF extensions’ list is no secret. If you or anyone wishes to have a look (and, why not, consider non-obvious incompatibilities) then here’s the list, established from CCleaner’s dedicated tool and saved with Nirsoft’s SysExporter, then brought to a simple png file :
http://img4.hostingpics.net/pics/980536FirefoxExtensions20161030.png
OK!
This can happen for instance when a comment author chooses to edit a comment after posting it.
The difference could also be your session. Maybe yours is bigger with lots of tabs ? That counts, even if tabs aren’t loaded.
Regarding add-on non-obvious incompatibilities, AMO’s reviews are manual so that should cut down on the number of hiccups involving at least one popular add-on. But you have many rare ones, so it’s a possibility. On the other hand if they don’t do much, there are less chances that they will collide.
And FINALLY you confessed about some of your add-ons! I was expecting a couple of nice suggestions from it, that’s why I’ve been curious, and sounds like Scrapbook X is worth a try :)
Although it is going to have a hard time becoming compatible with multi-process, let alone WebExtensions. I guess I shouldn’t rely on it for more than a week’s worth of stuff until its future is more defined.
(Issue regarding old µMatrix and NoScript: https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix/issues/554 )
@Tom Hawack
My original claim was a bit flippant and off the top of my head. I am always doing something on my screens (no, I do not have ADD), so it’s not like I experience a “waiting” moment. I also often use the FF restart option. In reality it’s only 2 to 3 seconds of my time to have to restart FF (do the action and focus elsewhere, eg flick up my QuiteRSS feed and clean out the drivel). What seems like 2 to 3 seconds to me, is in fact more. At worst I thought I would be off a couple of seconds. But nope, its more than that.
From a cold start, using the timer function on my android, approx 6 secs to appearance of GUI (blank white window) .. at approx 12 seconds the icons on the bookmark toolbar/status bar etc displayed (and I think Scrapbook X contents) and at 16 seconds FVD Speed dial filled in and we had lift off. So I am pretty much the same as you.
Still, was a great exercise in making you think you were doing something wrong/different xD Soz, my bad :)
That’s a most interesting point, Parker. We’ve read more than once users on AMO stating an incompatibility between two add-ons, and that incompatibility was therefor obvious. When everything seems to work, reading you, your example of uMatrix together with NoScript (fixed since), does not mean that everything *does* work as it should.
I don’t consider that a startup time > 15 seconds with 75 add-ons is a hiccup, but I may be wrong when I learn that PantsHunt42 with 57 add-ons lands on an operational Firefox under 2 seconds; that, together with your reminding of “hidden” incompatibilities (or at least “non-affinity”) between add-ons, maximized of course proportionally to the number of extensions (add-ons + plug-ins, even if here I have only 1 plug-in) triggers a curiosity bound to lead to investigation (sounds a familiar wording!).
We shall hunt and find the culprit, if applicable :)
Unfortunately add-ons can mess with each other. For instance some time ago, it was discovered that µMatrix worked in such a way that NoScript broke it even though everything seemed to work, looking at the UI. µMatrix has been updated by now, but I wouldn’t be surprised that having so many add-ons, some of them interact in such a way that start up performance is affected. If that’s the only hiccup you have, you should be happy :)
@PantsHunt42, interesting. We have in common several of the add-ons you mention.
My FF extensions folder holds now 53.4 MB.
Strange is that my decentraleyes extensions’ subfolder is 15.6 MB when yours is 5.05 MB … are you sure it’s not 15.05?
uBlockO subfolder is 4.8MB and its extensions-data root folder 19.7 MB …
I run Fastdial as well, but one page only, 60 links, 669 KB only …
I won’t layout it all, but I remain stunned with your 2-3 seconds startup time. Great, that’s very good. I don’t know, maybe is there 1 or 2 “subversive” add-ons here, no idea.
@Tom .. Yeah, I’m the same as you (no password to startup, but passwords have a master key) – i.e no saved cache, no saved history, no saved forms, no session data etc. I don’t think GM or userstyles count until they are needed, anyway the stylish sqlite is pre-allocated (864kb), I have about 50 styles. GM scripts = 14. uBlockO and uMatrix sqlite total 16mb (under extension data). FYI: my extensions directory = 27.5mb. FVD Speed Dial is 37mb (but not all tabs are loaded at the same time. I also have FoxClocks which loads 5 custom times as animated gifs with 24 hrs clocks on my status bar. And scrapbook X has 250+ entries. And I’m using FT Deep Dark theme.
Same as you – I consider my 57 addons to be pretty much “essential” – look, I could easily do without 5 or 6 of them, but I keep them because I have clients that use them (eg Print Edit).
My extensions directory = 27.5mb. The 6 biggest are
5.05mb – decentraleyes
4.44mb – FVD Speed Dial (excluding the FVD Toolbar profile folder = all your speed dials and icons etc)
2.85mb – FT Deep Dark (unpacked)
2.65mb – https everywhere
1.63mb – uMatrix (excluding extension-data)
1.46mb – uBlock (excluding extension-data)
Everything after that is < 1mb
How big is your extensions directory?
@PantHunt42, I’ve just tested again. 16-17 seconds.
Launch -> Master Password requirement (StartupMaster add-on) : 1-2 seconds
Master Password entered -> FF GUI : 5 seconds
FF GUI -> FF operational : less than 10 seconds : that’s where the SDK add-ons increase the overall time far more than other add-ons.
I’m surprised, considering your 57 add-ons, of your 2-3 seconds startup time. Besides the 75 add-ons, 51 userstyles (Stylish), 15 userscripts (GreaseMonkey), only 1 plug-in (Flash… I surrendered last week, re-installed only the plug-in, no activeX) … anyway, clean cache and history, no offline storage, a user.js optimization file (thanks to Pants’ commitment!) … I don’t see what more I could do, but I know what less (add-ons). I remove add-ons I don’t use, the 75 I have now are pertinent IMO and used (forget “75”, some are 50kB only…). All choices are a balance, keeping these add-ons, I see no better optimization. Only duo-core here.
I have no cache, but I do have 57 add-ons, including uBlockO. Quite a few tiny buttons/icons (21 on the status bar, 5 extra ones on the main nav bar), 15 icon’d bookmarks on a bookmark bar (for uber quick access), a pretty heavy Scrapbook X side panel, and a full on FVD Speed Dial with custom background and up to 60 visible dials per tab (depending on which one I left it on when I closed FF) and …My FF is ready to use in about 2 to 3 seconds – all icons loaded, everything working. Same as you, FF45 64bit on Win 7 64bit. My PC is now 5 years old (quad core if that makes a diff, 8gb ram). WHAT on earth are you doing to make it take 25 seconds?
Outside of FF, are you wiping out prefetch?
Surprised and glad to hear that ESR will be updated with the startup improvements also. For a minute there I was thinking ESR would have to wait for the next major update (March/April 2017) to the FF 52 base before seeing the improvement. Mozilla must be looking at the update as a major stability fix whereas most ESR updates are for security vulnerabilities. Excellent!
According to “browser.slowStartup.averageTime” in about:config, startup takes 1265ms with 17 enabled add-ons using FF ESR 45.4 x64. Pale Moon 27b3 x64 shows 1052ms with 20 enabled add-ons.
These timings in about:config and about:healthreport are lying. They shows time to first paint. Not show that browser is unusable for long time (~3 seconds for each “bad” extension) showing me mostly blank start page (for example, only raw search box is visible).
I experienced this for long time now, and even tried to report to extensions developers, but no luck. I reduced my 40-50 extensions to only 4-5 to have more sane startup times.
Good catch on the SSD. I was wondering if anyone would pick up on that. But… it doesn’t make as much difference as you or I might think it should. Not on my laptop. I installed the SSD in May (laptop) and from day one I’ve been disappointed in the lack of improvement in browser startup time. A reboot is now faster (38 seconds) but the browser startup times honestly seem unchanged. 18 extensions, 5 to 5.5 seconds until ready to use, on an old laptop, is pretty
goodamazing! Did I mention that the laptop uses SATA 2? ;)BetterPrivacy 1.69, Bookmarks menu 1.92, Classic Theme Restorer 1.5.8, Classic Toolbar Buttons 1.5.3, Click to Play per-element 0.3.3, Copy Plain Text 2 1.6, Downloads Window 0.6.4, Greasemonkey 3.9, Quick Context Search 1.5.4, Status-4-Evar 2016.10.11.01, Stylish 2.0.7, Tab Mix Plus 0.5.0.0, Toggle animated GIFs 1.3.1, uBlock Origin 1.9.12, YesScript 2.2, Yet Another Smooth Scrolling 3.2.6, YouTube Flash Video Player 49.1, YouTube High Definition 49.0
@Richard Allen:
>SSD
I have no idea how accurate the startup times are in about:config, I can only say that in my case the startup time seems feasible. Every browser that I have installed pretty much opens and is ready to use in about a second. I have FF ESR configured to open one tab (StartPage) when the browser starts up. I don’t have any pinned tabs and I don’t restore the previous session at startup. the only visible toolbars are the tab bar and the address bar. I have uBO and the Session Manger pinned to the tab bar and four other extensions pinned to the menu bar which is hidden but can be accessed with the ALT key. In my original post I had a misfire, instead of 17 enabled extensions I actually have 18. My 6+ year old laptop (Win 7 Home X64) which has the exact same FF ESR x64 configuration starts up in 2.8 seconds, according to what I see in about:config, and is ready to use in 5 seconds, desktop (Win 7 Pro x64) is ready to use in about one second.
Toshiba laptop: Intel Core2Duo @ 2.2GHz, 4GB DDR3. GT 230M 1GB, ADATA SSD.
Dell desktop: Intel Core i5 @ 3.2-3.4GHz, 16GB DDR3L, GTX 750 Ti SC 2GB, Sandisk Extreme Pro SSD, WD Black HDD
> Surprised and glad to hear that ESR will be updated with the startup improvements also
No, ESR will not be updated with startup improvements. Of cource users of Firefox ESR have to wait for the next major update to get major improvements.
It affects ESR wrt the release date, ESR will be postponed, too. ESR release dates are in sync with mainstream release dates.
These improvements will not be included in the current ESR version. The changes are too big and the risk is much too high for ESR.
That’s funny and exactly what I thought when I saw the title to this article. I have no idea what Martin’s source was for him to claim the change will affect ESR also but hopefully Mozilla is looking at it as a stability improvement. ESR does get stability improvements before the next major version is released, not often, but it does happen. We’ll see in a couple weeks.
Richard, I may have used a bad wording for that. I did not mean to say that ESR will get the change as well, but that the “change of the release date” will affect ESR as well. I edit the article to make that clearer.
They should do something to improve start times with several hundreds of tabs.
Takes too long and I only have like 700 tabs open :(
Isn’t it stressful to have so many ?
I used to have this problem (50 to 150 tabs), until I solved it with a different discipline but mostly by creating themed profiles and using Tab Groups.
What’s your “discipline” ?
I used to do that at home but after a while I was literally swimming in tabs and that somehow led me to never coming back to many of these things I wanted to get back to “later”. Everyone is different of course :)
That was until Firefox 4 I think. Panorama/Tab Groups really helped productivity and comfort for me. Now I guess I still have about 30 tabs but between profiles and tab groups, I only deal with a handful at a time and none gets ignored. (When one is obsolete I can spot it right away and close it, it doesn’t get lost at sea anymore.)
I just keep stuff open that I might/will use later. Bookmarking would take too much time.
FF gets restarted like once a week (when it crashes).
75 add-ons at this time. They all run fine and as I’ve often mentioned it the impact is noticeable on the extra startup delay.
What I never mentioned up to now is that it is indeed the SDK-built add-ons which are the longest to start. I can observe this with add-ons that have a corresponding toolbar button (I have many buttons as well!) : Firefox starts quickly (considering so many add-ons) and once its GUI is there I can see that buttons which don’t appear immediately (Firefox is still loading) are always those of SDK-built add-ons…
So this is good news for everyone and as mentioned in the article even more for heavy-weight add-on users.
I want to thank Mozilla for having taken into consideration my coming birthday to include this very nice gift with their upcoming Firefox 50. Most appreciated.
@ Tom Hawack,
Upcoming Birthday! I’ll be damned!
And all along I thought you were hatched – ’cause you generally have egg on your face… :>)
Happy Hatchday..oops… I mean Happy Birthday, Tom.
Why not a punch in the face while we’re at it, Ã la Lino Ventura in a famous French movie called “Les Tontons Flingueurs” ?! -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fRuExSRaBA
Startup is not important to me, performance (even with 2 extensions, yes just 2) is poor on various configurations. On top of that auto play videos, sadly ads on Ghacks included, never help. Not that Chrome is much better but it is more stable in my experience.
RG, sorry, but I have 100+ tabs open in Firefox (Aurora, actually) and if I close my browser, planning on shutting down for the night, when suddenly I realize that I forgot to check the weather, and need to fire up the browser again to quickly go to accuweather, anything over 3 seconds load time is painful. I do have an SSD, but still…
Startup time is always relevant.
I think there’s an about:config option to disable autoplay for videos.
Startup may not be important to you, but there are some users who treat their browsing much differently. They open the browser, do a few tasks and close it only to return later and do it again. This can be especially noticeable for them, and obviously for those who have larger amounts of addons (while other browsers start much quicker).
… and queue Tom with his mention of 70+ extensions :)
I for one welcome our new dark startup overlords .. I have 57 extensions (no system addons, and no plugins) and will relish the extra second or two I save on my (usually) daily Firefox restart. In a year I shall have enough time saved to run 2 miles, but only if I push myself (to get out of my chair)
What say you Brother Maynard?
howabout “cue” (as in, “cue cards”), not queue, as in “the line forms here, goes around the corner, over the hills and through the wood to grandmother’s house…”
Too British, haven’t understood the slightest thing!
Anything to do with billiard?
I like my Toms in queues :)
ESR delayed too? I thought ESR was all about that predictability.
ESR means “extended support release”, nothing else. It’s about long term support, not about fixed dates for patch releases. It was *always* the case that also ESR was postponed if mainstream Firefox was postponed.