Firefox lagging

I also have this problem, am on a mac and safari work fine but firefox has terrible lag, it is a new problem.

If you are on Windows and using a relatively old system, you may find that the K-Meleon browser offers that fastest experience in chess.com's live chess server. It doesn't pack the latest tech, but it still does a lot of things, it's very light on resources and very fast overall. It offers the best live chess experience on chess.com in my experience.

If you want to stick with Firefox, you may want to deactivate all the useless bloatware it comes with by tweaking the hidden "about:config" settings (type it in the URL address bar and press Enter). Careful with what you do there because you can easily make your browser perform much worse than stock if you don't know what you're doing. If you have extensively modified Firefox, it's more likely that any perceivable slowness or unresponsiveness derives from some of your tweaks.

I have highly customized Firefox installations running on Linux and Windows. Until a few days ago, I was also experiencing pretty bad 'lag' issues which made my bullet rating plummet 200 - 300 points below my average.

Just a few days ago (when I finally decided to look into it), I found out that the problem wasn't lag. The slowness was caused by some javascript resources that I had deactivated on my browser for security sake. The following settings:

"javascript.options.asmjs"

"javascript.options.ion"

"javascript.options.baselinejit"

It seems that chess.com's live chess interface relies heavily on javascript, so the above settings must be set to "true" (enabled) to enjoy the best live chess experience on Firefox. Obviously, javascript should be enabled in the browser - "javascript.enabled" must be "true" as well.

This affects not only the live chess interface, but also the engine analysis feature. The engine analysis on chess.com wasn't working right when I had the above settings set to "false."

So make sure that your browser settings and add-ons aren't jeopardizing javascript processes.

DOM objects also appear to be critical for the website's interface (v3). Any misconfiguration in your browser's DOM settings can render the website unresponsive.

Even if none of this applies, I still leave it here for whoever might be in the same situation. There are many other things that can be tweaked on Firefox to improve speed on chess.com's live chess, but some will depend on the host system.

I'm on 'Firefox'.. No, Problemo .. And, I make a point, to periodically 'Clear' my 'cache'/ browser, {under, 'Edit', as I recall}, regarding, 'Recent Activity' .. which, a person, 'in-the-know', recently, suggested !

If you browse in Private mode you don't have to worry about cache.

Got here because of the same problem..i dont want to use chrome but for some reason Firefox lags too much to play 3-0 or 1-0 bullet..i hoped that after the general update of Firefox, which btw became extremely faster, this issue would be fixed but no..i wonder if it's something generic or somemething that can be fixed by our setttings, is anyone having any ideas?

Just to add that disabling the "Hardware Acceleration Mode" of Firefox isn't working for me :/

Have you tried altering any of the Live connection settings?

https://www.chess.com/blog/News/how-to-adjust-your-live-chess-connection

I had this problem with older Firefox version and was not able to solve it. The new Quantum is better but not much.

The lag is not caused by internet connection so altering the connection settings should not do much.

Lag can be caused by any of the hops the traffic takes through the internet to get between you and the chess.com servers. Those settings options could potentially make the process better but aren't a guarantee.

If you had the problem previously and still do, then it is very possible that there is some equipment between you and the servers that is introducing the lag.

@martin_stahl  Thanks, i ve tried altering the settings with no success, no configuration solves the issue..What could potentially interfere? Could it be these javascripts that are mentioned above by kkl10? Also firefox disables shockwave flashplayer is this related with live chess by any means?

The reason why I argued the unimportance of changing the connection settings and stated that the problem is somewhere else is the lagging occuring also while for example draging pieces. You drag a piece from one square to another and you can clearly see the motion is not smooth, flawless like in Chrome. That's very confusing since the Firefox Quantum seems to perform better than Chrome in most of the tasks (that's my feeling while using it anyway).

What bugs me quite often is the delay between right-click-drag which creates an arrow and it actually appearing on board. The same goes for the coloring squares but less often. For some reason the delay does not happen every time nor is the same lenght - sometimes the arrow appears instantly, sometimes in 1, 2 or even more seconds.. It is confusing and I played with all the settings possible to solve it - but I could not..

There a number of factors that can play into lag. Some are client side (running processes, shared network bandwidth, etc), some are general internet related, some could be on the chess.com side as well. The current site has a heavier Javascript framework than what existed on the old site and that can cause some lag, depending on how efficient your browser is interpreting the code and other processes that might cause CPU cycles to be used.

The site doesn't use Flash for directly hosted content (not sure about Twitch) but it is recommended to have Flash disabled for the site (only loaded when needed). Flash running, even in a background tab, could cause slowness and I've seen it happen. Minimizing other things on your system that can use CPU cycles and network resources can improve things some. I've seen pretty bad lag when other people on my local network are using network intensive apps (streaming).

For basic members, the ads that get loaded can play a part. The site uses an ad network and while most of the time they shouldn't cause issues,  occasionally poorly performing ads do make it through. 

Finally, all internet traffic flows from the client, to your local network router, to the ISP, then to a number of routers in the world (depending on where you live) then to the routers used by the chess.com datacenter, then to the Live server process. Lag can happen in any part of that connection path. The site can make it's client code as robust and as efficient as possible, same with the Live server code, and they can get the possible connectivity on their end but some other part of that path can still introduce lag.

Exactly the same here..

@Martin_Stahl  Many thanks! Most likely the issue is caused by some mis-configuration of Firefox, since "Live chess" runs flawless on Chrome..