Thanks for the replies.
In my testing while Gnome isn't as snappy as some of the lighter
weight desktops I've not seen Firefox take anywhere near that long,
When using LXDE, Firefox starts up in under a minute. Something else with Gnome might be
the cause. I also tried running Gnome (xorg) but performance was abominable too.
I know the mSD card used does affect the performance quite a bit in
that regard too, which card are you using?
Its a 16GB UHS-1 microSD card from a reputable vendor. I don't think that's the
problem.
Separately, I initially tried to install Fedora 29 aarch64 on a 32GB Class 10 microSD
card. I burned the card several times but it would not boot successfully. Consistently it
failed with
Bug 1644873 - WARNING at drivers/mmc/bcm2835_sdhost.c:408/bcm2835_send_command()!
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1644873
-- John