Here, we’ve seen timings on a fresh install going down from 36 s to 17 s when using LZO and the language pack fix. The Raspberry Pi represents our toughest test-case. Test machine: Raspberry Pi 400 with SD card With the use of the LZO algorithm, the cold start time for Firefox, Thunderbird and Chromium are now 3 s, 4 s, and 2 s, comparable to the native ~2 s launch time for these applications. On the sample system above, Firefox times were roughly 5 s. On Fedora 36, the results are extra interesting, because Fedora uses a different kernel configuration for the Squashfs filesystem management (including decompression). This represents improvements of roughly 42% and 29%. The results are consistent for Thunderbird as well as the Chromium snap, where the startup time has improved from 12 s and 9 s to 7 s and 5 s, respectively. Similarly, on openSUSE, the startup time has gone down from 13 s to 4 s, a 70% improvement. With the LZO algorithm, the cold start has gone down to about 6 s. When running on Kubuntu 22.04, with the gnome-3-38-2004 and gtk-common-themes snaps compressed with the XZ algorithm, the cold launch times for the Firefox browser averaged about 15 s. New benchmarks Test machine: AMD Ryzen 5, 8GB RAM, Vega 8 graphics, NVMe PCIe 256GB drive The results are consistent across different distributions, including other flavours of Ubuntu, Fedora 36 and openSUSE Leap 15.4 as we will demonstrate in the next section. Switching the compression algorithm for these two snaps to LZO delivers (our second) significant improvement in the Firefox start-up times.Īn additional benefit is that this change doesn’t just affect Firefox, but also affects the start times of all snaps that depend on the GNOME and GTK snaps, including Chromium and Thunderbird! Since the Firefox snap loads libraries from these two snaps during launch, the decompression process can potentially create a bottleneck. What we hadn’t initially considered was that the Firefox snap depends on both the gnome-3-38-2004 and gtk-common-theme snaps, which were still being delivered compressed using the XZ algorithm. Prior to the start of this series, we had already improved Firefox startup performance by using LZO compression for the Firefox snap. Our testing shows an average reduction of about 6 seconds on modern systems with fast storage. This primarily affects the very first launch of Firefox after a fresh install and significantly reduces the initial setup time. Mozilla’s latest fix means that Firefox now only loads one locale at a time, based on the system setting. ![]() Previously, Firefox copied all language packs on first start, a large and unnecessary overhead since most people run Firefox with only one user interface language, e.g.: English or French. The second is an update to the GNOME and GTK theme snaps that Firefox depends on. The first is a change from Mozilla regarding how Firefox handles language packs. There have been two major improvements since the last update. Simply run the snap refresh command to ensure all your snaps are up to date. These fixes are now available in the latest stable version of Firefox. ![]() Our latest improvements look to deliver an average 50% reduction in start time after a fresh install compared to Firefox 101, consistent across a range of distributions and platforms. Since the last update, we have made significant progress in Firefox startup performance. You can catch up on the story so far in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. This series tracks our progress in improving startup times to ensure we are delivering the best user experience possible.Īlong the way, we’ll also be addressing specific use-case issues that have been identified with the help of the community. It improves security, delivers cross-release compatibility and shortens the time for improvements from Mozilla to get into the hands of end-users.Ĭurrently, this approach has trade-offs when it comes to performance, most notably in Firefox’s first launch after a system reboot. The Firefox snap offers a number of benefits to daily users of Ubuntu, as well as a range of other Linux distributions. ![]() This week, we cover two significant performance improvements that have just landed for all users. Welcome to the latest update in our Firefox snap performance series.
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