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Comment by MrBuddyCasino | Hacker News Reader

I'm on 57 since some time now. It is certainly faster, but still not competitive on macOS compared to Chrome. Responsiveness and especially cpu load are quite high as soon as animations are happening. Is it just me?

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Not just you. I've been using it on and off since Nightly and it drains my battery fairly quickly. I'm back to using Chrome.

Ironically, I read this blog post (https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/11/entering-the-quantum-era-h...) in Chrome and Firefox, and on Firefox the scrolling was noticeably slow to the point where I found it distracting.

Edit: Turns out scrolling a simple page up and down causes Firefox to use 40% CPU. Is it not using any hardware acceleration?

Not sure if it's using hardware acceleration right now (i.e. in v57), but there's a new rendering component (WebRender) coming in one of the next releases which does everything on the GPU.

Hardware acceleration is a feature in the options. I've not found that it's very useful and had to turn it off for performance reasons.

Maybe it depends on the graphics chip? In some OSX/model combinations, the initial switch from integrated to discrete is terribly expensive and laggy. If the browser is somehow triggering the switch, I can see how it could be stalling.

It is definitely not happening for me on Sierra 10.12.6 on high-spec MBP-tb late 2016, this FF version really flies. CPU is not low, but FF and Chrome have always been hogs in my experience, as long as they are responsive I don't care too much. I guess it also helps that it killed a bunch of extensions...

I just tried Firefox 57 on my Windows machine. One of the first pages it showed me was https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox. Scrolling on that page I immediately noticed that it was dropping frames, a lot. I tried the same page in Chrome and it maintains 60 FPS. I've got high spec machine but with an NVidia NVS 310, which might be the problem. However, Chrome is fine...

I would try turning off hardware acceleration in the settings. I was having a problem with stutter and jitter in previous versions and this helped with my issue.

Battery drain on Mac OS (High Sierra, early-2015 MBP Retina) is definitely more significant than Chrome, especially with video, as measured with the "Energy impact" index in Activity Monitor.

Twitter timeline measured with "Live video" open on right-hand sidebar, then "Live video" collapsed:

FF 57 - 225, 22 Chrome 61 - 60, 3

I'm on a 7 year old macbook air and FF 57 is noticeably faster than 56.

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