Performance

mksh21 · Unread post by **mksh21** » 2023-12-19, 22:53

Operating system: Windows 10
Browser version:v32.5.1
32-bit or 64-bit browser?: 64bit
Problem URL:
Browser theme (if not default):
Installed add-ons:
Installed plugins: (about:plugins):

Good day, I recently started using palemoon and I was wondering why sometimes it feels slow on modern hadware (Ryzen 5 5600h,RTX 3060 mobile and 32gb ram). Even though I have a number of addons installed, I tried to disable them completely before making this post. What do I mean by slow? Basically whenever I try to switch through multiple loaded tabs, I have to wait for an additional second or 2 before it switches to the tab. And if I click ,accidentally, multiple times when a page is loading, Palemoon will just stop respponding for around 4-5 seconds. In addition to that, YouTube UI (not the actual video) takes a significant time to load compared to the video and the page becomes unclickable. I tried a fresh reinstall of palemoon a couple of times and nothing changed.

If possible, please include the output of help->troubleshooting information (as text):

BenFenner · Unread post by **BenFenner** » 2023-12-19, 23:43

Regarding YouTube and similar JS-heavy behemoths and Pale Moon performance, see here: viewtopic.php?p=237432#p237432

andyprough · Unread post by **andyprough** » 2023-12-19, 23:48

mksh21 wrote: ↑
2023-12-19, 22:53
I tried a fresh reinstall of palemoon a couple of times and nothing changed.

When you did a fresh reinstall, did you run Pale Moon prior to installing any extensions to see if it was still slow to switch between tabs?

The YouTube Lazy Load extension github page says 'Warning! Only old YouTube design is supported at the moment', and NoScript 5.1.9 is known to corrupt some Pale Moon profiles, and not sure what Greasemonkey scripts you are using or what they do. Looks like you have YouTube Lazy Load disabled, so that one may not be having any effect, but maybe it makes some harmful pref changes when installed?

mksh21 · Unread post by **mksh21** » 2023-12-19, 23:50

BenFenner wrote: ↑
2023-12-19, 23:43
Regarding YouTube and similar JS-heavy behemoths and Pale Moon performance, see here: viewtopic.php?p=237432#p237432

So in other words, not much really can be done on anyones side apart from the website devs?

mksh21 · Unread post by **mksh21** » 2023-12-19, 23:59

When reinstalling palemoon, I purposefully tried to browse as usual before changing anything and I got the same result. I also tediously tried disabling addons one-by-one and restarting palemoon just in case. It made no difference. I mainly use userscripts for youtube but ,as mentioned before, it made no difference if I had them on or off (or with fresh reinstall). I read the topic considering youtube and other forum threads (from around 2019-2020) but I generally see that moving tabs around and just loading google or ecosia (or other search engines) or loading some tabs and switching tabs, palemoon doesnt feel that responsive. I checked with other browsers (ungoogled chromium, Floorp, Mercury) and they dont really have such problems.

andyprough · Unread post by **andyprough** » 2023-12-20, 00:11

mksh21 wrote: ↑
2023-12-19, 23:59
I generally see that moving tabs around and just loading google or ecosia (or other search engines) or loading some tabs and switching tabs, palemoon doesnt feel that responsive. I checked with other browsers (ungoogled chromium, Floorp, Mercury) and they dont really have such problems.

It seems particular to your situation. Pale Moon is very lightweight and nimble - especially tab switching should be handled with ease. YouTube is a vexacious website for many people on many browsers - you can see there are a lot of forum posts about it here and some specialized Pale Moon extensions and tools for dealing with it.

What websites are you visiting that are causing problems besides YouTube? Are you going to a bunch of discourse forums, or doing some online gaming in the browser, or anything else that has particularly heavy javascript or graphics or media? Any websites that are constantly refreshing or constantly adding more data?

When you do a fresh install, do you find and delete the Pale Moon program files and profile folders, or do you just do the standard Windows uninstall process and then reinstall it?

mksh21 · Unread post by **mksh21** » 2023-12-20, 00:17

I tried multiple : liquipedia.net, uesp.net, 9gag.com, speedtest.net, waveform.com, privacytools.io, ecosia.org, startpage.com. I use the browser for general entertainment of watching videos and looking up information. Simply scrolling down in search engines casues the browser to stutter. When I reinstall palemoon, I use HiBit Uninstaller that searches for left-overs when deleting palemoon (It finds the left overs in program filed and profile folders you mentioned and more) so it would be a cmopletelly get rid of any leftovers of palemoon from the system. Also just to mention, all my drivers are up to date and all windows updates are installed.

andyprough · Unread post by **andyprough** » 2023-12-20, 03:06

mksh21 wrote: ↑
2023-12-20, 00:17
I tried multiple : liquipedia.net, uesp.net, 9gag.com, speedtest.net, waveform.com, privacytools.io, ecosia.org, startpage.com.

I opened all those together and browsed around in them and didn't experience any problems or slowdowns with tab switching or stuttering when scrolling.

Do you have hardware acceleration enabled? Go to the Tools menu - Preferences - Advanced tab - General tab -- you should see a checkbox for 'Use hardware acceleration when available'.

Edit: I think that might be it - your first post shows you have a preference set of

Code: Select all

layers.acceleration.enabled = false

Try checking that hardware acceleration checkbox to change that preference to 'True'. See if that makes a difference for you.

suzyne · Unread post by **suzyne** » 2023-12-20, 04:11

mksh21 wrote: ↑
2023-12-19, 23:50
So in other words, not much really can be done on anyones side apart from the website devs?

That's my experience. Visit any browser JavaScript benchmark and compare the results of Pale Moon with a big name browser on the same test, and the results will confirm your experience that Pale Moon is the tortoise when it comes to many sites that rely on a lot of code. The poor performance goes beyond loading times, and continues once such a site is fully loaded.

I don't think there is any real solution for a whole class of sites (where scripts are essential) that are sluggish, but that is the price I pay for loving and using Pale Moon.

(And I am not going to say you shouldn't visit such sites, because they are bad or something.)

mksh21 · Unread post by **mksh21** » 2023-12-20, 14:27

I have tried using hardware acceleration on and off (and restarting the browser when changing the setting) it made 0 difference for me.

Al6bus · Unread post by **Al6bus** » 2023-12-20, 18:32

There is no need to use external 3060 for web browsing
Try switch to integrated one
Also update these integrated drivers
https://www.amd.com/en/support/apu/amd- ... en-5-5600h
and finaly u have modern hw @ so use avx2 build
ftp://ftp2.palemoon.org/avx/

suzyne · Unread post by **suzyne** » 2023-12-20, 21:28

mksh21 wrote: ↑
2023-12-20, 14:27
I have tried using hardware acceleration on and off

That is my experience too.

Speedometer 2.0 describes itself as:

Speedometer is a browser benchmark that measures the responsiveness of Web applications. It uses demo web applications to simulate user actions such as adding to-do items.

which is one way to execute a lot of JavaScript and see the results.

https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/

For both Pale Moon and Edge, this test was done with an empty new profile with no plugins, themes or extensions. I used the AVX2 version of Pale Moon because that is what I normally use.

Hardware acceleration was enabled in both cases. Out of curiosity, I then made another empty new profile for Pale Moon and turned off the HWA and repeated the test, and the results were so similar (slightly slower) there is no reason to post the pic of the speedo.

My conclusion is that for the class of website that uses massive amounts of code like a web app, there is little point in experimenting with builds or hardware settings because Pale Moon is simply appreciably slower. So anybody coming from a big name browser will immediately notice the difference and if they use such sites, advice that will actually alleviate the difference doesn't exist.

Unread post by **Moonchild** » 2023-12-20, 22:31

"SpeeDOMeter" is a very, very narrow window on website performance. It has no variation in the content rendered, just runs the exact same bare-bones to-do list thing through various frameworks (including measuring debug versions of such frameworks which is totally stupid!). As far as benchmarks go it really is an extremely poor example, and I don't understand why people continue to put value on the results of it. It says more about the innate slowness of the frameworks used (and their often overzealous polyfilling) than performance of any browser.

back2themoon · Unread post by **back2themoon** » 2023-12-20, 22:44

Both Adguard AdBlocker and uBO? You seem to have several conflicting extensions, even if some are disabled. I'd start over with a fresh profile, only installing what is truly required.

Decentraleyes is abandoned I believe. Last Pale Moon update was two years ago. I guess someone could ask for an update. There was indeed a response, back when that version was released.

I don't have performance issues with a 16-year old CPU and less than half that RAM. Yes, if I open YouTube (and a few others) things will get slow. I avoid these and open them with FF when needed (using the Open With extension).

suzyne · Unread post by **suzyne** » 2023-12-20, 23:21

Moonchild wrote: ↑
2023-12-20, 22:31
"SpeeDOMeter" is a very, very narrow window on website performance. It has no variation in the content rendered, just runs the exact same bare-bones to-do list thing through various frameworks (including measuring debug versions of such frameworks which is totally stupid!). As far as benchmarks go it really is an extremely poor example, and I don't understand why people continue to put value on the results of it. It says more about the innate slowness of the frameworks used (and their often overzealous polyfilling) than performance of any browser.

Benchmarks can be problematic!

But I posted those results because they reflect my real life experience. When I use web app like sites such as Photopea, Outlook, Discord or Instagram they feel like they are around 4 to 5 times slower, (and that is not about page loading, but time taken to do stuff) so what this particular benchmark shows doesn't surprise me at all and rings true.

Is there is another benchmark that gives a fairer or less narrow indication of JavaScript performance?

I am happy to go through the same process with a different measurement and see what the results are.

athenian200 · Unread post by **athenian200** » 2023-12-21, 03:40

suzyne wrote: ↑
2023-12-20, 21:28
https://browserbench.org/Speedometer2.0/
For both Pale Moon and Edge, this test was done with an empty new profile with no plugins, themes or extensions. I used the AVX2 version of Pale Moon because that is what I normally use.

To be honest, Pale Moon is not as optimized for speed as Chromium. Chromium-based browsers have sacrificed user freedom and extensibility for the sake of rendering speed. We have a browser that is very extensible and works pretty well, but is somewhat slower and sometimes takes longer to implement the latest web standards. Back in the day, Firefox was criticized for being much slower than Chromium. We're still building on that "slow core" Firefox was criticized for in a lot of ways... we've improved it a lot, but not nearly as fast as Firefox and Chromium have improved theirs. Plus, a lot of the choices they made to make their browsers faster are precisely the things we don't want. The Rust-based CSS parser rewrite, e10s, and the removal of extensions. Getting rid of XUL and adopting a rewritten CSS parser did speed things up.

But yeah, Pale Moon is never going to beat mainstream browsers on speed. Maybe on privacy and extensibility, but speed is not really an arena we compete seriously in, especially not with modern websites. Pale Moon is definitely better at rendering certain older websites that modern browsers choke on, though. Especially text-heavy sites with thousands of lines, like the kind used to read programming code through xref or Mercurial. Our parser is great at that... it's just not great for modern web frameworks.

At the end of the day, Pale Moon is just one tool in the toolbox. If what you need is Widevine DRM, WebRTC, a fast browsing experience, and everything you need built in... Pale Moon probably isn't what you're looking for. But if you need Adobe Flash Player, FTP access, XUL extensions, maybe you don't trust Google Safe Browsing, or you're worried about privacy issues with WebRTC... well, that's when you come to us.

In our defense, though, I tried your website and found even modern Firefox is much slower than Edge, and actually comes in somewhere between Edge and Pale Moon. Though in my testing, Edge and Firefox scored a bit lower... 103 for Edge, 78.3 for Firefox, and 29.8 for Pale Moon. That is, yes they're faster in this test, but not by the margins you're seeing? I tried running on another computer, and Pale Moon got 45.7. So a lot of this seems to be hardware dependent, and Pale Moon seems to benefit from raw clock speed and IPC a lot more than it benefits from multiple cores. That's somewhat okay on desktop, but I can imagine it being an issue if someone is on a laptop or something.

So that's another important point to consider... that Firefox-based browsers are inherently slower than Chromium-based ones to this day, and we've had to eschew a number of potential speed-ups Mozilla has gotten because we had various concerns about privacy or extension compatibility, so we're naturally going to be behind them on benchmarks like this.

So, sure, I would concede that when it comes to modern websites that use a ton of frameworks optimized for Chromium, Firefox is slower than Edge, and that Pale Moon is in turn slower than Firefox. But I would also contend that anyone who downloads Pale Moon expecting it to render modern websites as fast as Chromium has unreasonable expectations given our codebase and our goals. Even modern Firefox can't do that, and they've given up far more in the quest for speed than we were willing to.

An analogy I like to use is this... Pale Moon is built like a tank. It won't get you where you want to go as fast, but you have a lot of options to deal with whatever your surroundings are. Edge is more like a luxury sports car... it goes very fast and has a lot of modern conveniences, but it's very easy to get a ticket for speeding or find yourself in trouble when trying to drive on old gravel roads. Firefox is like an old minivan... it's practical and better at dealing with situations a sports car couldn't handle, but not as powerful or extensible as the tank, and not as fast or convenient as the sports car. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone else, but that's how I see it in my head.

CrimsonAkiha · Unread post by **CrimsonAkiha** » 2023-12-21, 11:19

Another consequence of Pale Moon's extensibility and user freedom is that it's much easier to "break" it, especially with extensions. Not that I think any of that is a bad thing (how are we to learn without our mistakes?), but people do need to be more careful about how they set things up and which extensions they pick, instead of just installing whatever sounds good. I spent a while testing various extensions I used through about:performance and some layout benchmarks, and aside from all of OP's conflicting extensions, I've noticed he's using CanvasBlocker Legacy, which is one of the ones I found makes Pale Moon orders of magnitude slower no matter what hardware you use.

This workaround maybe isn't as powerful, but I settled for just uninstalling that extension and flipping "canvas.poisondata" to "true" in about:config instead. Frankly, the rest of that list of extensions doesn't look so great either, so maybe the best course of action is to go through the same tests I did to figure out which extensions were causing problems. Or start fresh/remove everything and only install what you know you need.

Off-topic:
FWIW, even if Pale Moon can't handle modern sites as well as the big name browsers, it certainly compiles faster than all of them (even on old hardware!). If you like patching the code yourself/customizing build options/etc, it's perfect. And it's even better if you use a source-based system like Gentoo GNU/Linux or so, which allows you to do all of that system-wide. (I know some people just use that system to compile programs with experimental optimizations, but that's not really the point and not what I use it for, I just like being able to actually fix bugs when I have a problem and remove things that annoy me, distract me, or otherwise make the computer difficult for me to use. No other combination of operating system and browser would exactly let me do that, and I didn't really care about modern sites as much as most people anyway.)

Unread post by **Moonchild** » 2023-12-21, 11:24

athenian200 wrote: ↑
2023-12-21, 03:40
An analogy I like to use is this... Pale Moon is built like a tank. It won't get you where you want to go as fast, but you have a lot of options to deal with whatever your surroundings are. Edge is more like a luxury sports car... it goes very fast and has a lot of modern conveniences, but it's very easy to get a ticket for speeding or find yourself in trouble when trying to drive on old gravel roads. Firefox is like an old minivan... it's practical and better at dealing with situations a sports car couldn't handle, but not as powerful or extensible as the tank, and not as fast or convenient as the sports car. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone else, but that's how I see it in my head.

I like that analogy although I would not say a "tank" but rather an APV (armoured personnel vehicle) or an all-terrain jeep (think halo "warthog?") that would do relatively poorly on a highway but does fine otherwise

back2themoon · Unread post by **back2themoon** » 2023-12-21, 13:50

I remember talk about future plans (might have been Tobin) to improve multi-core performance?

(not to be confused with multi-process)

Unread post by **Moonchild** » 2023-12-21, 16:35

Wasn't tobin, but we can't do that kind of work when we're playing catch-up all the time to the moving target of Chrome piling more and more onto web standards. it's simply lower priority

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