Firefox is so slow, is it becoming irrelevant

I'm not easily given to flaming wars, and this is not meant as bashing Firefox, but over the past few weeks with 16.04.1 and 14.04.5 iso and upgrade testing I've been running Firefox with totally fresh profiles (so it's not due to cruft in an old profile) and when I go back to my daily driver (based on 14.04.1) I find both Chrome and Opera are downright snappy in comparison. This is all on the same hardware, and I did try Firefox on my daily driver with a fresh profile to be sure it wasn't a Xenial specific issue.

I had mostly switched from Firefox to Chrome and/or Opera anyway just for aesthetics sake (yes, Firefox has tried to become a near clone) but noticing how much slower Firefox has become is worrisome. It makes me wonder if they've just given up. I wouldn't have noticed this but since Firefox is the default browser when I'd file a bug using ubuntu-bug pkgname apport naturally opens Firefox as part of the process. So, is this just the sad state of affairs surrounding Firefox in general?

Let's block ads! (Why?)

Firefox is so slow, is it becoming irrelevant