Firefox starts too slowly (A reason for less popularity, consciously and unconsciously)

[FelixKDH]

A couple of years ago a version of Firefox was released that was heralded for its vastly increased speed at loading websites, which probably was also intended to decrease any arguments for other browsers.

However what I've found consistently is that I prefer to click to open another browser, simply based on my learned experience of Firefox starting so slowly. I usually don't think about any reasons, but when I try to think of why, that is foremost on my mind. And I do believe it also influences other people's usage of the browser or comfortability with it.

Now the "popularity" argument is obviously not my personal priority here, but I think it is a good additional argument worth considering.

Basically, Firefox takes way longer to start, and that is basically independent of which browser has more addons or plugins and so on (the other one has more).

[RancorSweetly]

I, on the other hand, have experienced nothing but FAST response times from Firefox, especially on startup. Chrome has too many processes running in the background and seemed to take forever to open. Not sure why we are having such different experiences, but I have found Firefox to be the fastest browser on my PC and on my phone hands down. ⚡

[Maha]

On Linux, I often find that it starts very slowly, especially when its terminated abnormally via `kill` or similar. Not sure why this is the case. But once it gets going I really don't feel much of a difference. I remember opening Chrome once and finding the experience "smoother", but that may have more to do with the perception rather than the actual speed.