Comment by kroltan

Did you happen to have used uBlock Origin during your stay?

It's the most common source of browser-load latency, as it by default blocks the main page request until it is able to load its blocklists, so when you open the browser afresh, or reopen a window, it takes a while until the browser gets to continue loading the thing you asked.

I think by default it comes as enabled in Firefox, go to the "uBlock settings > Filter Lists > Suspend network activity until all filter lists are loaded", though of course it is a tradeoff.

From the Wiki: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dashboard:-Filter-lis...

> In Firefox-based browsers, this setting is enabled by default. Disabling it gives the option to potentially speed up page load at browser launch, at the cost of possibly not properly filtering network requests as per filter lists or rules.

> In Chromium-based browsers, this setting is disabled by default, since Chromium-based browsers do not support natively suspending network requests.2 Enabling this setting in Chromium-based browsers may lead to negative side-effects at browser launch.