I upgraded Ubuntu from twice over from 20.10 to 21.04 and then to 21.10 and since then I have found Firefox opening times to be quite sluggish.
I just ran Blechbit after running Firefox's own cache remover and despite having these settings on Bleachbit it still show 600mb of cache in Firefox so I ran Firefox cache remover again plus removed the cookies this time, rebooted the computer and its still sluggish. Anything I can do? whilst runnin git appears fine, I just don't understand why its gone from a few seconds to ten to open. Thanks in advance.
Are you testing with extensions disabled. I recently experienced a slow Firefox on 20.04 draining the PC resources. It ended up being the Google Container. Once I removed this extension, problem cleared. I reinstalled the Google Container with no issues.
I only appear to have two, what is a Google Container, is this something specific to your use of your computer?
I have:
Widevine Content Decryption Module provided by Google Inc.
This plugin enables playback of encrypted media in compliance with the Encrypted Media Extensions specification. Encrypted media is typically used by sites to protect against copying of premium media content. Visit Encrypted Media Extensions for more information on Encrypted Media Extensions.
and
OpenH264 Video Codec provided by Cisco Systems, Inc.
This plugin is automatically installed by Mozilla to comply with the WebRTC specification and to enable WebRTC calls with devices that require the H.264 video codec. Visit https://www.openh264.org/ to view the codec source code and learn more about the implementation.
I am not using UM lately but didn't Firefox package their browser now as a Snap? If so, they are known to be slow on initial start. Apparently, Mozilla wanted this.
OMG are they thick??? Anyway I thought snap was merely the name of the package manager, why are they slow on start up then? Time for another browser then, shame.
Edit: So I have found I can install the Firefox package directly from the .deb file and it wont be the snap version and its interesting to read some of the files may be compressed to save space so it might be possible to uncompress them instead? I remember I had a game called Return To Castle Wolfenstein in the 90s or 2000 and it had compressed data files, I was able to unzip these, then zip them back up using a weaker compression algorithm and it made the game running much faster though I doubt I'd be luck enough to do that on Ubuntu. Apparently snap startup daemon is slow, perhaps it can be automated on the system boot or might this make the pc slow for whatever use I had started it up for eg something other than using the browser?
It turns out from what I read they will discontinue the original .deb files
Anyway I thought snap was merely the name of the package manager, why are they slow on start up then?
snap is indeed a package manager but snap-packages are not regular packages like .deb or .rpm
snap packages are a kind of containers, so although they run on the same kernel as other packages, they have their own libraries, filesystem and environment and share as little as possible with the host system. This is because of security and this is why they are slow to startup (they have to load a lot more than the application only).
You could say that they are complete mini-systems which are 'sandboxed'
On filesystem level, a snap is effectively an isolated filesystem that is mounted at boot time as a virtual device via the 'loop' devicemount.
try this in a terminal:
df -h
and see that all your snaps are mounted as filesystems
There seems to be a trend within ubuntu to switch internetbrowsers over to snap packages. Not only because of the fast security update cycle of browsers but also because of the added security that these sandboxes deliver.
I had wondered too why other apps were opening sluggishly, VLC for example was another slow program, I mean in Windows you can open an MP3 within one second, VLC on here is about 7.
Yeah, I avoid snaps generally.
Try to uninstall the vlc snap and install vlc via apt (or boutique or synaptic)
You'll see that it is much much faster to startup
