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I am making a new windows virtualbox image today, and just installed firefox from https://www.mozilla.org

I have used firefox for years, and it has always being very fast and as responsive as my cell phones. To my surprise, the new firefox 38.0.1 was quite slow on the Guest. It's tolerable, but typing addresses and switching tabs cause delays that can be clearly felt. It's as if I am remote controlling a computer through a slow connection.

I started over from a new image and installed FF, but it is still slow. It's both slower than IE8 that comes with the Guest, or the same version of FF on my host Windows.

I was wondering if anyone knows the cause. My best guess is that my Guest OS is a fresh install of Windows, which does not include drivers for graphics acceleration/graphic cards (CPU-integrated or discrete). In fact, it is using a VGA driver.

Does anyone have a similar experience and/or know of a solution??

-- Update --

The System\Acceleration Setting had Hardware Virtualization on for both Enable VT-x/AMD-v and Enable Nested Paging. The Guest OS has 2048 M memory, and does not have Guest Additions installed.

-- Update2 --

As the accepted answer suggests, this might be a bug in the 38.0.1 version. After installing 38.0.5, the speed seems to be OK now, as Firefox usually was. There still appears to other minor issues though. e.g., after the installation, Firefox is not accessible from the Windows startup menu.

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  • information about he hardware configuration on the virtual machine is required, does your hardware, support hardware virtualization. Sounds like you have noticed the difference between performance without hardware acceleration..
    – Ramhound
    Commented May 31, 2015 at 5:33
  • @Ramhound , Please see my update. I have used the same host OS to host Lubuntu 14.04 and didn't notice FF speed issues. Everything else seems to be fast in the windows guest: IE8, Chrome (slight slower than IE8). But FF is not very responsive.
    – tinlyx
    Commented May 31, 2015 at 5:39
  • does updating to version 38.0.5 fixes your issue?
    – magicandre1981
    Commented Jun 4, 2015 at 17:21

1 Answer 1

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Firefox 38 is slow because Mozilla used Direct2D with Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP) for the standard VGA driver in Windows 7.

Firefox 38.0.5 will come out today, so make the Update and the issue should be fixed.

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  • Thanks. I've tested just now with a newly installed 38.0.5, and Firefox was as fast as it used to be.
    – tinlyx
    Commented Jun 5, 2015 at 8:06

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