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Comment by frinks2000 | Hacker News Reader

frinks2000

This is all fine if you are running Windows. On a mac it will spin the fan faster than anything else... with two tabs open. Firefox has become a Windows browser, if anything

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Have you profiled it? At any time over the last few years when I've done that Chrome has been behind Firefox, which is behind Safari, but getting closer. That said, if you're reporting anything about browser performance the first step is usually to test without any extensions installed to confirm you're not chasing the wrong codebase.

This is possibly a function of which two pages you have open, and/or the Extensions you use.

I'm currently running >300 tabs on Firefox 54.0.1 spread across four Windows, on a 16 GB, 15-inch 2016 MacBook Pro, 2.9GHz Intel Core i7, under macOS Sierra.

The primary extensions I use to keep performance in check are Auto Unload Tab and Tree Style Tab. Post the two pages you are loading, and I'll check them out on my setup.

HTML5 games can ramp up the fan very quickly. For example, until Auto Unload Tab kicks in, Game of Bombs will pretty reliably chew up Firefox [1]. Most of my content that I keep open are text-heavy, and not crazy on Javascript ("crazy" to me is re-implementing the browser UI and taking over the entire screen experience with that; I don't mind the UI change, but heavy DOM manipulation with Javascript isn't kind to batteries or memory at this time).

[1] http://gameofbombs.com/landing#/play

I'm using FF as my main browser on both Linux and macOS and never had any issues like that. Most of the people I work with use macOS, a lot of them use FF and never heard anyone complain about that.

Maybe there are some other things that cause this on your machine?

I'm curious if this has something to do with video. Do you experience much more power when consuming video on the browser and is there a difference between how firefox, chrome, and safari use the gpu while decoding video?

This might be interesting to quantify.

It might not be video. For a while my firefox was forcing the system to use the dGPU which caused the fan to spin and battery performance to drop. The cause was the google talk plugin that got loaded when I opened gmail.

One of the useful things about Chrome in this sort of situation is its task manager, which often makes it much simpler to work out what's causing this sort of problem.

Just an anecdote, but back in my Windows XP days, I tried out firefox and found it pretty slow, seemed even worse than IE (in 2004ish?), whereas chrome was lightning quick. Fast forward several years and using gnome 2 on linux, and I found firefox felt snappier overall than chrome. I still do find firefox quicker for most thing (not google maps), though they have various add-ons which doesnt make it a fair comparison.

You found Chrome lightning quick in 2004? Must have been since it was released in 2008.

Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004 by the way.

Thanks - my memory is a poor witness!

My primary machines are MBPs, but I find I only ever run into this if the two tabs are YouTube and Twitch.

Weird. When I was at Mozilla (2011), almost everyone had a Mac.

People are downvoting you just like devs dismiss your bug reports about the issue, but I can tell it is exactly the same for me: Firefox on MacOS is extremely slow and uses too much CPU.

People can blame mine (and many others) particular system as much as they want but the fact remains: FF on some MacOS systems is a big CPU hog while Safari, Chrome and Opera just work fine.

In Linux (with the same plugins) it works rather well though (except when using some stuff like Google docs).

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