Can't describe it perfectly. The UI is responsive but page loading is just severely slowed down -- not always but often. I have a bunch of privacy extensions but again, they don't seem to make Chrome sweat.
If you are using uBlock Origin, you may want to see if un-checking "Uncloak canonical names" option in the "Settings" pane in the dashboard makes a difference.[1]
There have been reports of slow page load with some network configurations, and this has been linked to DNS lookup in uBO.[2]
Chromium-based browsers do not support CNAME-uncloaking, and so this would explain why the issue is not present in Google Chrome.
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[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dashboard:-Settings#u...
EDIT: pay no attention to the text below, I have misread the linked documentation. uBO isn't using external proxy for any network requests.
Not sure how much -- or at all -- you're involved with uBO. Your name does ring a bell though so I'd like to remark to you that making the users' browser use proxy is a step too far. It shouldn't automatically be enabled.
A privacy extension should do everything it could locally and stop there. If I one day figure it's not enough then I'll set a privacy VPN (or use an existing one).
I don't want that decision made for me on my own machine without my consent. :(
And apologies if my comment is misguided -- I only skimmed the linked page and I might have misunderstood.
FYI I'm asking, not doubting or blaming or whatever.
But the fact remains that I installed 100% the same set of extensions on Chrome and it loads pages at least 2X faster.
I might be a programmer, I might care about putting a rod in Google's giant personal-info-gathering machine, and all that good stuff that makes us feel we're making a difference in the world -- but when 1/3 of all my pages load more slowly in Firefox, I can tolerate this only for so long.
So I don't really know which factor is the real page load speed detractor. I just wish the Firefox team fixes it.