Firefox is slow. In fact, it gets very slow the longer it is kept running. If you are web developer like me, who relies on Firefox for better productivity through its excellent add-ons, such as Firebug, then you must be feeling frustrated with the slow (sometimes extremely slow) performance of Firefox 4 (and/or previous versions as well). Browser speed is of course relative: I am comparing Firefox to Chrome in this case.

Turns out that Firefox is not the only one to blame; there are a host of add-ons that render Firefox to a sluggish speed, both at boot and operating times.

But fikar not, I have heard that folks at Mozilla are identifying the trouble-making add-ons and, as a first step, they have published a list of the most sluggish Firefox add-ons (something like a Hall of Shame). In addition, they are also helping out the add-on publishers to help them improve their add-ons. Here’s how the chart looks like at the moment:

I am switching to Google Chrome for my normal browsing, but Firefox will remain my preferred browser for development!