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Those who use Firefox on a low-end laptop or any such low-spec machine, what tinkering have you done to get the best experience? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Firefox has been improving drastically in terms of performance with every release. It's pretty evident in recent months, which is very heartwarming to be honest.

I, however, do to some bad circumstances, have been stuck with a not-so-good laptop (8 GB RAM, a 6th gen processor in AMD A8 7410) and Firefox doesn't run that well on it. This is something that I've observed with Firefox- if you have a decent machine then it will run amazingly fast. However, on lower-end machines, performance can be a struggle AT TIMES.

Any tips on making this browser run at it's best potential on a weak system are appreciated!

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[–] JubilantJaguar 7 points 1 year ago

IMO "performance" is almost impossible to talk about in any rational way. People have different expectations. Biases and fallacies are at play. Performance is almost like medicinal effectiveness. It's the domain of anecdote.

My anecdote: I run Firefox on specs much inferior to your "struggling" laptop, and have done for years. Think: very low-end laptops which don't even have fans. I have rarely had any speed issues to bother me. It's fine, it feels plenty fast enough to me. Yes, absolutely comparable to the computers I've used in office environments. Obviously I might have a different experience with video games or video editing. But I mean, in the end Firefox is only a web browser, if people are having issues rendering web pages on any consumer device, to me it really feels like something is wrong.

TLDR: Firefox has been zippy on every cheapo low-end laptop I have ever used, no performance tweaks requires, and I do have comparisons for reference.

Addendum: it just occurred to me that you might be using Windows, not Linux! If that is the case, I have an obvious suggestion for a performance tweak. 😏