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Comment by bratao | Hacker News Reader

I'm a die-hard Firefox fan. While all my colleagues develop in Chrome, I'm the weird one who uses Firefox and always catches some problem in rendering when testing.

But recently I installed an 4K monitor. I use the Latest Windows 10 and have an GTX 1050 graphic card. The Firefox on this resolution is VERY slow. I have no problem in Edge or Chrome. Please, if any dev is around, check this use case.

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Hi, dev here. :)

Can you capture a profile using steps from [0] and send them to us/me?

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7knnn4/firefox_qua...

Thanks for chiming in!

I have a question. Where are you guys at with this issue?

The thing is, literally every retina resolution Macbook I've tried this on (3 different machines) resulted in massive CPU hog with 4 tabs open on a few basic websites. Let's say they are reddit, hn, and youtube.

The Awesome bar is slow, switching tabs is slow, computer warms up in 15 seconds. Fans kick in, the rest is history. New profile, existing profile, it doesn't matter.

That goes for every single release after 57, including Developers, Beta, and Nightly builds.

15 inch ones are worse than 13.

This doesn't happen when I use external screen.

My feeling is in order to reproduce the issue one has to - Find a Macbook Pro released after 2012. - Open Firefox with aforementioned websites - Try to interact with the websites

Are there any active issues for it?

I remember this one: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042

All dependent bugs are fixed, but alas, it made no difference.

Is there's anything I could do to help resolve this?

There's some mention of improvement for this in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1265824#c221 -- scheduled to be released in Firefox 63.

You might try the nightly and see if it's already fixed.

1. Nightly has some profile incompatible database changes 2. That bug is OS X only. The parent is on Windows 10.

Pro tip: Windows users can try out Nightly (or Beta or ESR or Developer) without impacting their main install with the portable packages from PortableApps.com: https://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox-portable-nigh...

I thought this was maybe just a Mac-specific issue, but apparently not! Chrome and Safari are fine, but Firefox is horridly slow.

I'm kinda hoping more Quantum / Webrender stuff will fix things in the future.

I recently switched back from Chrome to FF and I'm running in 4K under Ubuntu. Same graphics card as you (or Intel integrated graphics). No performance issues to report.

I have performance issues on Mac OS when it wakeups and attached to external monitor. Some tabs start to eat memory and CPU, until I kill process... it look like very old issue with scaling but it's not fixed

Do you have a link to the issue? I encounter similar problems regularly. I restart Firefox regularly because of the memory use. Also, it chews on the CPU more than other browsers when seemingly idle.

Could you file a bug report?

Exactly! Firefox is very rough and slow compared to Safari on my 2016 MacBook Pro, with or without an external 4K monitor. I'd like to use Firefox, but I tend to just open Safari instead because it just feels better.

I’ve read in places that using the “More Space” options for Retina Displays (essentially any higher resolution than the default), causes Firefox to slow down. I was in the process of moving from chrome to Firefox and realized mine was slow and I read some responses indicating what I mentioned above. I abandoned the effort then and there. It was unbearable.

I'm also using Windows 10, 4K monitor, Firefox and GTX 1060 and have no issues. So your issue might not actually be related to resolution.

Are you running any new software packages related to the monitor, e.g. LG's software for screen rearrangement and split screen use? I didn't dig into the actual cause and what was being hooked, but I was seeing enormous lag with no apparent cause when it was running.

I have the exact opposite issue. Firefox is zippy, and chrome slows my whole computer down. Switching between discord and chrome often incurs a 10-30 second lockup of my machine, where I basically just have to wait for the two to battle it out. No such issue with firefox.

++ This was my experience, too, running FF on an older Mac (2014, I think) with a big retina screen.

When FF 52 first came out scrolling felt considerably laggy on my 4k monitors (Arch, i3 window manager, GTX950). It seems to have improved somewhere in the last year. I'm now using Firefox as my daily driver on all my devices.

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