In the last few days, Google Docs has become downright hostile to Firefox. Extremely slow framerate, I'm typing words faster than they appear -- UX problems I thought I left behind in the early 0's.
Talking to my friends, it seems like they're having the same problem. But I can't see much discussion about it. Is it happening for everyone -- or just us?
by hamburgerwah on 8/20/21, 5:25 AM
Google hamstrings their tools in anything but Chrome. It's always an "accident" or a "bug" but you can plainly see it only ever goes in one direction. Pull the files down and use something like libreoffice or even word/pages.
by flas9sd on 8/19/21, 11:24 PM
the resist fingerprinting (introduced via Tor uplift I read) has some downsides for javascript performance (specifically to resist timing fingerprints). If you have it enabled, disable and test if this was causing a slowdown.
Maybe you got the B in A/B testing of a new feature that only saw proper Blink tests. In reddits r/firefox you can get some feedback, also I've seen bugzilla engineers following up on users being able to post performance profiles - a bugzilla search (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=google+... - sort by date desc) could provide you a bugid if you can narrow it down to a specific interaction?
by 97-109-107 on 8/20/21, 8:48 AM
I noticed it recently as well, but only under one circumstance. The slowdowns appear when I screenshare firefox from a video-call in chrome.
by muzani on 8/21/21, 12:24 PM
It's not a recent thing. I faced the problem 3 years ago. I used to use Google Docs for a lot of things, but it falls apart under many conditions. Microsoft makes the best ones. It runs smoothly and it's free too. Eventually I just bought MS Word because being cheap with a word processor was not worth the trouble.
by sayhar on 8/20/21, 4:46 PM
Thanks all. Update:
- Brave(!) had the same slowness problems.
- So I realized that maybe the 60-page long example doc I was using was the problem. Moved to a 2-page long doc and it did seem better.
by jml7c5 on 8/19/21, 9:52 PM
Try running the profiler? (Developer tools -> Performance tab, not sure if it's only be available Nightly/dev editions.) May give an indication of what's wrong.
Might be an issue with hardware acceleration.
by jensv on 8/20/21, 1:37 AM
I've had some issues where changesets are not being saved/written. End up writing in a text editor and pasting into Google doc later. :/
by julienfr112 on 8/19/21, 9:24 PM
no problem on my part (firefox that comes ubuntu 20.04). only add on are ublock origin, downloadtheall, selenium ide.
by slater on 8/19/21, 8:37 PM
check your installed addons, try with new profile?
by pyb on 8/20/21, 11:22 AM
IME: More and more sites don't even load in Firefox any more... Including Slack.
by new_guy on 8/19/21, 9:31 PM
Try just restarting Firefox? If you leave it open too long with too many tabs etc there's memory leaks that make it unusable.