Why is Pale Moon so slow?

[enzostone2015]

I know this might just not be the right forum to post this on, but why is pale moon slow? like, its VERY slow. It can't even load some adobe flash animations without lagging.

[Gemmaugr]

Should probably be in https://forum.palemoon.org/viewforum.php?f=3 instead, but wait until a moderator weighs in or moves the thread.

To answer your question, we'd need a lot more information. It's not slow for me for example, but we might have different OS's, hardware specs, bit-versions, addons, etc etc.

[Night Wing]

I am using 64 bit linux Pale Moon and it is not slow for me. Some people on here are having trouble getting to sites where Cloudflare is involved, but I can usually get to the site between two to four seconds of time. On other sites not involved with Cloudfare, I can usually get there in about one second of time.

But other factors come into play too like memory, processor, processor speed, internet connection, etc.

[BenFenner]

There are two main answers.

1) Pale Moon has not gotten the many rounds of significant performance-focused development that other big two engines have gotten throughout the decades. These other browser engines (on the same hardware) will run noticeably faster. And it is not mostly placebo/theater either. I'm talking about real, actual, significant speed differences.

2) Pale Moon often gets fed polyfill code (if we're lucky!) from web sites which is designed to work eventually, but not performantly.

[UCyborg]

The closer the website is to the full fledged web application, the worse it will perform in Pale Moon. Though there are also some where JavaScript is not primary offender, but the HTML document is just very large with possibly some tricky styling added to it.

You mention Flash animations, I'm assuming you encountered the site that runs it with Ruffle? Ruffle is a poor substitute for real Flash plugin and performs especially poor in Pale Moon. Maybe if you tell the site in question, maybe someone can help you get it to run with actual Flash, but don't count on it, not many people here who love hacking / programming. It may be easier to find the SWF file and run it locally.

Anyway, some sites are pointless to try and use in Pale Moon and if your habits exclusively contain sites that perform poorly in Pale Moon, then using Pale Moon may be an exercise in futility for you.

Pale Moon has not gotten the many rounds of significant performance-focused development that other big two engines have gotten throughout the decades. These other browser engines (on the same hardware) will run noticeably faster. And it is not mostly placebo/theater either. I'm talking about real, actual, significant speed differences.

Next version might improve on that somewhat, I saw some potentially interesting changes, though I haven't got around to compiling the development version to try it yet.

[BenFenner]

The closer the website is to the full fledged web application, the worse it will perform in Pale Moon.

I understand and agree with the sentiment. But to get pedantic (do I have any other mode?) I would argue my web site is as fully fledged a web application as they get, and it performs extremely well in Pale Moon.

[UCyborg]

OK, but you probably had PM in mind when developing it.

And I bet it's still smaller in amount of JavaScript than typical offenders.

[BenFenner]

Off-topic:

OK, but you probably had PM in mind when developing it.

Close.I developed it exclusively using Pale Moon.

And I bet it's still smaller in amount of JavaScript than typical offenders.

Oh by a million miles, yes.

But there is also one core feature that is 99% JavaScript and it also performs exquisitely in Pale Moon.

[sofrosune]

I would argue my web site is as fully fledged a web application as they get, and it performs extremely well in Pale Moon.

Off-topic:
What asweome website is that?

[BenFenner]

Off-topic:

What asweome website is that?

https://www.sr20-forum.com/server-news/ ... ahead.html (reference the footer)

Admittedly it's not Google Docs or OnShape or Open Street Maps (web applications masquerading as local applications) but it does nearly all of the web application things* (minus the advertising/spying/data collection/analytics). You could argue it's missing payment processing (coming soon), an externally accessible API and is not consuming any traditional web APIs itself but I've written those in other web apps that of course work perfectly well in Pale Moon.

*MySQL + PHP + unobtrusive JS + novel CAPTCHA + asynch jobs + outgoing e-mails + world's best pagination + user sessions/accounts/roles/settings + secure password hashing + time-locked hashing comparisons + cross-site request forgery protection + cross-site scripting protection + SQL injection prevention/user input validation/sanitation/parameterization + search feature + chat feature + mark-up support + emoji support + UTF-8 support + embedded image support + embedded video support + comprehensive open-graph support + Easter eggs + April fools theme + winter holiday theme + AI bot/crawler/scraper prevention + error logging + access logging + one-click spammer removal + automatic spam-bot detection and removal + etc.

[andyprough]

Off-topic:

What asweome website is that?

https://www.sr20-forum.com/server-news/ ... ahead.html (reference the footer)

Awesome forum and really cool cars. Your BMW is a sweet looking ride, Ben. That's a fun place to look at car pics.

[BenFenner]

Off-topic:

Awesome forum and really cool cars. Your BMW is a sweet looking ride, Ben. That's a fun place to look at car pics.

Thank you for the kind words Andy.
I have to say the forum is mostly focused on FWD cars by nature of which USDM vehicles got the engine the forum is focused on (Nissan's SR20 engine). And FWD is just not my thing. Hence the cars in my signature.

Those build threads linked in my signature are only viewable by non-members as of a month ago when I finally added a feature I've wanted for years!
https://www.sr20-forum.com/server-news/ ... st!1054941

Excuse me, I don't get to talk cars much around here so it's a nice change of pace.

[andyprough]

I have to say the forum is mostly focused on FWD cars by nature of which USDM vehicles got the engine the forum is focused on (Nissan's SR20 engine). And FWD is just not my thing. Hence the cars in my signature.

I noticed that - I was thinking to myself, these cars in his signature don't really look like they are running Nissan SR20 engines. But I landed on that BMW M-Coupe of yours, that's a very cool looking car. Do you race it at the time attack events?

[BenFenner]

Off-topic:
The clownshoe sees as much track time as I can manage. Sometimes that is 3 times a year, sometimes it is none. I've been tracking HPDE for so long now I've long been an instructor and get "free" track time. But the car and I have only done two timed racing events (one Solo II event, one Global Time Attack event) and no wheel-to-wheel racing... It's just not built at all for racing in a class so is never competitive in the classes it gets put into. (315-wide rear tires really sends you into some crazy classes. )

I can't wait to get out in it again. It's been a while. Which is a long story.

But I did pick up a donor car for it recently, which will donate a V8 and 6MT to the cause.

[andyprough]

But I did pick up a donor car for it recently, which will donate a V8 and 6MT to the cause.

Oh my! You've got a lot of work in front of you!

[BenFenner]

Off-topic:
You don't know the half of it.

I have to build a house first. And before that I have many non-trivial car repairs to make. And before that I need to gain employment...

[athenian200]

Pale Moon moves slow... because Firefox is what happens when you go too fast and put speed ahead of every other concern.

[andyprough]

Pale Moon moves slow... because Firefox is what happens when you go too fast and put speed ahead of every other concern.

I don't ever really notice a speed difference in loading pages between Pale Moon and any other browser, not for the websites I visit. I think it may also have to do with the difference in hardware - I use new hardware with lots of memory, CPU cores, graphics capability. I could see that someone using much older or more limited hardware could have some of their programs get bogged down. So, maybe speed is, a) in the eye of the beholder, and b) dependent (as always) on computer resources.

Or maybe it's just only one issue on one Flash animation site like the OP was talking about. But who knows, the OP appears to have disappeared from the thread and from the forum the moment after he posted the first post. We may never know without a URL, troubleshooting info, etc -- but we have zero information whatsoever.

[Moonchild]

Can't speak for Adobe Flash animations (unless of course it enforces some terrible emulation like Ruffle) but in general if there is severe slowness on websites it is because those websites will overload any browser that isn't 100% what it was "designed for" with polyfills for literally everything and the kitchen sink. Even things that are natively supported. i.e. this is often more an exclusionary thing enforced (deliberately or not) by webmasters and/or framework devs rather than a Pale Moon sourced problem.

Our engine is in the same ballpark of performance as Firefox, Chrome and Safari when it comes to raw speed of rendering and javascript. So any big discrepancies seen are due to how websites are being run, code-wise.

As Andy stated this is more visible on ageing hardware, because it will compound there with our single-process design not greedily using every scrap of CPU and RAM a system has.

[tooshorttoolong]

For me the biggest offender is youtube. Its pages display very slowly on Pale Moon and they usually make the CPU run at 100% (on one core) for some time (could be seconds, could be up to one or two minutes, it depends).

On Chromium, youtube displays much faster and without much CPU usage. But of course both youtube and Chromium are made by Google…

Also (off topic) the youtube player works about one time out of 100 for some reason. I prefer when it doesn’t work since I use yt-dlp and mpv to watch the videos (without ads).

(I have a gaming PC with a Ryzen 7800x3d, 32GB RAM, a fast GPU. On Linux.)