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Google docs on Firefox unusable for everyone, or just me?

26 points by sayhar ↗ HN
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?

15 comments

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slater
check your installed addons, try with new profile?
julienfr112
no problem on my part (firefox that comes ubuntu 20.04). only add on are ublock origin, downloadtheall, selenium ide.
new_guy
Try just restarting Firefox? If you leave it open too long with too many tabs etc there's memory leaks that make it unusable.
db48x
No, there is no memory leak.
jml7c5
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.

flas9sd
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?

sayhar
> Maybe you got the B in A/B testing

I suspect this is the case

jensv
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. :/
[dead] watchstrap
Maybe you try to use other browsers
hamburgerwah
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.
97-109-107
I noticed it recently as well, but only under one circumstance. The slowdowns appear when I screenshare firefox from a video-call in chrome.
pyb
IME: More and more sites don't even load in Firefox any more... Including Slack.
sayhar
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.
muzani
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.