Firefox is unusable on Linux. Way too slow. But Brave browser is very snappy. It's the fastest chrome fork, and has great features, like vertical tabs, which have become essential to me.
Believe me, I want to use Firefox, but I've tried it on multiple PCs and a dozen different distros, and it is always significantly slower than chrome. I actually benchmarked startup time and page load times a few weeks back and found it was 2-3x slower. Since then Brave has gotten even faster.
I can confirm. In my experience on edge-case hardware, a raspberry pi 2, Chrome will play 1080p video while Firefox will stutter. And since raspberry pi's are treated as TVs, I get absolutely drowned in ads on Chrome. To be fair, on my other machines I rarely see any ads(ad blockers), so to have my video interrupted by an ad on youtube is way beyond acceptable.
I am now using screen mirroring software "moonlight" to mirror my PC to the TV pi. I find people who watch ads weak minded apologists. Which is also the reason I will never again use Chrome.
Have you compared it to other browsers? What distro do you use? I've benchmarked performance on Arch, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu and found that Firefox was 2-3x slower than most chrome forks.
I use Brave on Android for websites that don't work in Firefox. It's probably faster but I don't care. I care more about the difference between 10 and 100 ms (all browsers are not great at general responsiveness) than between 1300 and 1800 ms.
I also use Microsoft Edge on Linux for Teams video calls and can't say that I notice an appreciable difference in performance.
Slower may be true, but is it slow to you? Are you actively loading hundreds of web pages and need Firefox to be that much faster for them?
Maybe it's just because I live far away from host servers that aren't from local companies, but real world latency between your machine and the web server is IMO more important than the browser loading a page 200ms faster than another.
I respect your individual experience, Firefox may be slow for you on Linux. It's not for me.
That being said, I don't believe this kind of performance is the deciding factor in choosing your web browser any more. All of them are doing at least "Okay" in browsing the web. Other things seem to be more important, at least to me. For example, Firefox (and Mozilla) are not without faults, but they surely are one of the few obstacles remaining to prevent a Chromium monoculture and a fall-back into IE4 times.
I've put up Firefox as my default for a long time. But the gap in performance is so big, now, that I find it painfully slow to use. Recommend you try the latest brave, just so you can see for yourself what performance is possible, and how much nicer it feels to have a snappy browser.
All Mozilla need do is fix the longstanding performance issues and they'll win me back.
If you use an Nvidia GPU (i.e. a gaming machine or ML desktop) you'll have to force a whole bunch of settings to use it through a compatibility layer that isn't particularly stable, or accept the CPU hit of about 1 core per video file at 1080p. It's not unusable but very annoying when the fallback behaviour accidentally triggers on a laptop and your CPU ends up constantly boosting, draining the battery.
Firefox on my Intel iGPU + Nvidia dGPU likes to pretend the iGPU doesn't exist. Very annoying but I've given up on trying to get it to work on desktop. Chrome seems to do a lot better for somme reason.
There was a time, some years ago, when Firefox on Linux had become very slow, so I had to switch to Chrome as my main browser.
Regardless which is my main browser, I have to keep both around, because they have different bugs, so there are rare cases with some sites that work well only with one of them.
A few months ago something happened with Chrome, which abruptly (after a version upgrade) has begun to start only after a very long and annoying delay. Perhaps it attempts to connect to some Internet address blocked by the firewall and it gives up only after a timeout.
In any case, this sudden slowdown of Chrome made me switch back to Firefox as my main browser, which is OK now, because Firefox on Linux has become fast again and it no longer has any noticeable speed difference vs. Chrome. Also some problems that Firefox had when playing YouTube videos have been solved.
I agree that chromium based browsers are significantly snappier on Linux than Firefox. I also switched to Brave from Firefox and I benchmarked them every once in a while to see if Firefox was improving. On a Mac Firefox seems to perform better, although still slower than Brave.
Firefox isn't unusable on Linux but it should have first class performance and it's a shame it does not.
