I am developing a google mapi api implementation (v3), but I mainly use Firefox 12 for developing because of Firebug. I think Firebug is a great tool, much better than the one in Chrome.
But compared to Chrome Firefox is SO slow with loading, scrolling etc! I doesn't even want to do continuous scrolling..
Is there a way to improve Firefox' performance on Google maps?
3 Answers
Easy Solution
Ironically, it is probably Firebug which is slowing down Google Maps for you so much. To increase performance, the easiest thing would be to disable Firebug when you're not doing development.
Better Solution
Unfortunately, often times disabling such a useful tool is not an acceptable solution. Thankfully it's only a few components of Firebug that play the biggest role in slowing things down. The biggest performance gains come from disabling the "console" and/or "net" tabs, either by clicking them and deselecting enabled, or going through the options tab. Firebug's performance hit is most noticeable on Google Maps because of the large amount of requests it makes and the complex DOM structure.
Backup Plan
If that doesn't help, you can try updating Firefox and Firebug and hope that they've improved performance in recent versions. The most recent version as of when I am writing this is Firebug 1.10.0a7 for Firefox 12, and on my machine it seems to perform reasonably well even with net and console enabled.
2On my system, I found that disabling the "use hardware acceleration when available" option made google maps really a lot more responsive
Find it in Preferences -> Advanced -> General -> Browsing
Consider using maps.bing.com: I'm not sure what it is about google maps that makes firefox slow, but it's not just a browser issue; bing maps doesn't have the issue. (indeed, chrome seems to exhibit oddly unsharp tiles when scrolling on bing maps, in a fashion reminiscent of firefox's quirks on google maps).
I hope firefox finds a solution, because I'm not holding my breath for google to.
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