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Comment by grumblestumble | Hacker News Reader

Chiming in here. I would absolutely love to switch to Firefox for a host of reasons, ranging from "I don't want to use Google products" to "I love the tabs". Unfortunately, it's completely unusable for my workflow on a 2015 Macbook Pro with 16G RAM. I keep a variety of tabs pinned (JIRA, Zeplin, Gitlab, Jenkins, Invision, etc) and it seems as if they continue to hog a disproportionate amount of resources even when in the background, which is not an issue on Chrome.

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> Unfortunately, it's completely unusable for my workflow on a 2015 Macbook Pro with 16G RAM

I run Arch Linux on this exact hardware and Firefox runs amazingly well there. It only runs like crap under macOS, which makes me think there's something with macOS specifically that's going on there.

I really want to switch to Firefox, so every once in a while I force myself to use it 'properly' for a week or two at least.

Such a two week period has just ended, and while FF does feel snappier than before, I'm running into exactly the issues you describe. When using Firefox, my four-year old MacBook Air pretty regularly slows down to the point where my music starts stuttering and even force-closing FF takes a while. I've had bluetooth devices disconnect too.

Now if it was just that, I could perhaps accept that maybe my laptop just can't handle my browsing behavior anymore. Unfortunately the same thing happens on my 16GB RAM Mac Mini. Not as often, but still.

I don't have these problems with Chrome, even when I clearly have too many tabs open for my memory to handle. Occasionally my music will stutter when I open multiple gmail tabs in Safari (I use Safari for stuff like email and banking), but it's rare, and nothing like what happens with Firefox.

I wonder what's causing that on your computer, because I'm running Firefox on a late-2011 MacBook Pro without any issues, and that's with a ton of tabs opened (including a bunch of pinned tabs running multiple instances of Office 365 in separate containers, Slack, and so forth) and the usual crowd of extensions (UBO et al). It's bouncing between 0 and 5% CPU utilization.

I experience regular "gray outs" on Ubuntu with FF hogging so many resources that eventually the only thing that works is killing it. This happens to me both on a 5 year old desktop as well as on old Lenovo Thinkpad (X2002s). However, I believe flashplayer to be the culprit as I often have quite a few youtube tabs open -- obviously never more than one playing though.

Why are you using Flash Player for Youtube? I've gone nearly 4 years since installing Flash on any machine, its pretty well unnecessary today. If you want to reduce performance though, using Flash is one way of going about it.

Depends on your hardware and drivers. On a couple of my older machines the Flash plugin is the only way I can get hardware accelerated video decoding.

I've tried figuring it out, but haven't been able to pin it down. Is it even possible to check tab resource usage the way I can in Chrome? If not, that's another reason I'd probably keep coming back to the latter.

Thing is, it's not even that I have so many tabs open. It's always been fewer than Chrome, and with fewer active extensions to boot. Furthermore, it also happens on my other computer. The other one has 16 Gb of RAM, so it can handle quite a bit more, but the problem happens often enough that I also switched back to Chrome there.

There's about:performance but it's not as full featured as chrome's resource usage view unfortunately.

I had to stop using FF on windows when it tanked because I disabled hardware acceleration (to force google maps to stuff their stupid 3d satellite images in the can). Look at the your rendering settings would be my random guess.

You can get more detailed memory usage information by going to about:memory

It’s usually the profile (some tweet years ago, some bad setting ) would be great if Mozilla had some solution for this other than zap your profile. Alternatively it’s an addon they have.

I'm in the exact same boat. Trying since a year to switch (back) to FF, but my testing period always end in frustration. Chrome is much more "snappy" in all regards.

I just don't understand this. Furthermore, I don't know if I've ever seen a "scientific" test of FF vs. Chrome using real world apps.

At work, I have several GUIs in browsers that I access through Chrome, and they cause instant 3+ GB of usage. I can't test FF due to group policy, but anyway, Chrome can be a hog, too.

Are you saying that those same half dozen apps, when pinned in Chrome, do not cause any RAM issues for you?

Reading so many comments like this confuse me. I run an older mac, and I find firefox very stable. It's with chrome that I have all the problems you're describing. Every time I'm forced to use Chrome, I'm reminded how unusable it is. But I'm in the minority it seems.

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