Hacker News Reader

Comment by ralusek | Hacker News Reader

Dying to get off Chrome but FF has been giving me soso performance on 2015 MBP. Video playback is iffy and battery usage is terrible =/

View on HN

I'm with you. I use Firefox as my daily driver, but it really makes my dual-core processor struggle (2015 MBP for home, 2017 for work). It's a great browser in every way except performance. They really need to prioritize that.

Out of curiosity, do either of you run uBlock Origin to help block misbehaving background stuff, or any other plugins that might contribute to battery usage?

NoScript really accelerates performance on my FF install. Places like Buzzfeed are unusable on my laptop without it.

Excessive JS usage is probably the culprit behind the move to Chrome. A number of popular sites are so packed with JS that using Chrome is the only way for normal users to achieve reasonable performance.

Nowadays every webpage downloads 2 megabytes of framework JS and css preprocessors and analytics trackers and then pegs the CPU for a few milliseconds to display a paragraph of text.

If the page actually does anything on top of that the problem grows quickly.

FF runs fine on my six-year-old Thinkpad. Of course I run PrivacyBadger which blocks most adverts and trackers.

Are we really saying that Chrome is just more efficient at wasting CPU cycles to show adverts?

Maybe it's an OS thing. I'm on macOS, and FF feels much slower than Chrome or Safari (all using uBlock Origin). One big thing is HTML5 video playback, FF really drives the CPU up, even on a 15" 2017 MBP. Page loading is also worse, even on basic sites like HN.

I have heard multiple people say that it is an OS thing specific to MacOS. Can't verify, have just seen that around HN a few times.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com