Firefox has seemingly gotten more bloated over the years and for me, at least on the recent builds, has been increasingly unstable/buggy. For those who may be rocking Firefox (or Iceweasel) on systems that may be a bit limited on free and available resources you'll likely find these tips help out a bit. These were pulled from the Linux sub-reddit here ( https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/39q6xt/some_useful_firefox_tips_to_fix_choppy_scrolling/) and were not created by myself. Copying here for reference.
Was good advice and figured it was worth sharing. Hope it helps someone.
Maybe it will be useful for someone.
Enter in address bar about:config and...
Fix choppy scrolling
Find layout.frame_rate.precise set it to enable. It increases animation speed. On my system it elliminated choppy scrolling almost completely.
Fasten page loading speed
Find privacy.trackingprotection.enabled and set to true. It's a built in Firefox tracking protection. It also speeds up page loading by 20-40%.
Huge reduce of memory usage
- When you open a webpage with images, Firefox stores the images for a time in uncompressed form. This results in an improvement in speed at the expense of greater memory use. If too many large, uncompressed images are in memory simultaneously, it can lead to increased memory use. Web sites with a lot of large images can require very large amounts of memory. This problem can be mitigated by putting a cap to the amount of memory used by decoded images. To do so, search for image.mem.max_decoded_image_kb. By default, this is set to a very high value – 256000 or ~256 MB. Reduce this cache to something smaller, such as 51200 (50 MB).
- Memory assigned to Javascript is way too high. In webpages where there are lots of scripts doing lots of fancy things, memory footprint can increase quickly. To reduce memory consumption by Javascript, locate the parameter javascript.options.mem.max and change its value from -1 (automatic) to 51200 (50 MB).
- Also find javascript.options.mem.high_water_mark, and set it to 30 from the default 128. This parameter tells the garbage collector to start running when javascript is using 30 MB of memory. Garbage collection releases memory back to the system.
- Firefox caches each tab you have open in such a way that they don't have to be re-parsed when you use the back and forward buttons to flip through history. This cache is different from the memory cache. The default is set to 50, meaning Firefox will remember the last 50 pages opened by each tab. If you have the habit of reusing tabs (as opposed to opening new tabs), the browser session history can grow to fantastic sizes. So what you should do? Close the tab when you are done with a page and open a fresh tab for a new page. Alternatively, you can reduce the number of pages Firefox keeps in cache. To do this, open about:config and set the desired value in browser.sessionhistory.max_entries. A value of 10 should do.
To increase scroll amount (was very useful on my Logitech mouse) find mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount and set it to something like 40.
Add extension which unloads pages from memory by timeout or manually. This one[1] works fine.
I had a very bad choppy scroll on my laptop on any DE and now it's fixed. Also it reduces memory usage a lot.
Hope it helps.
Was good advice and figured it was worth sharing. Hope it helps someone.