The last ESR of Firefox was reasonably fast, since I updated to 45 everything is sluggish. The upside is that some HTML5 audio features work better now, the downside is that the Youtube video player is so inefficient I needed to install a plugin that disables it (the fan is roaring).
Many years ago I installed a native Mplayer plugin for Firefox, and I could watch videos on the web. It was a 800Mhz CPU, and a 32MB Radeon graphics card? I could play videos without touching the CPU?
Right now I am typing a HN comment and FF sits at 100% for whatever reason...
My point is, everything implemented in a browser that is not a HTML/CSS renderer or JS JIT compiler, seems to suck to the point of being useless.
As much as I would like to get rid of the Flashplayer plugin, its the most reasonable way to play video in FF. Less of a CPU hog, less crashes. How did we get into this mess?