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Comment by brian-armstrong | Hacker News Reader

Strange. I almost exclusively use OSX (El Cap) and haven't had performance issues asides from needing to restart the browser once a month or so. Hopefully they get those problems resolved soon, the browser is super quick when it's working right.

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Are you using a "scaled" resolution? If so, there's a bug in redrawing that pegs a core, and kills battery life.

It can be mitigated by setting

  gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque = true

in about:config, but the fix is invasive, and has taken years to get prioritized and worked on. I've seen reports that it should finally be done in FF64 or 65.

I find that I cannot watch a YouTube video on my MacBook in Firefox for more than 10 seconds without the fans coming on at full throttle. This is one of the few reasons that I start up chrome, as strangely I can watch the same video in chrome without performance issues. I haven't had this issue on Firefox on PC

Disable "Automatic graphics switching" in "Energy Saver" in OS X settings. This fixed this problem for me (which started about 4 months ago).

(I'm on Yosemite.)

I'm on Yosemite and I don't see anything like that in the energy saver preference pane.

That setting will only appear if you have a 15" with a dedicated GPU. 13" only have "Energy Saving" integrated graphics and don't need the setting

Google properties are a lost battle.

Google Sheets and Google Docs have been horrible on anything than Chrome for a while as well, and I guess they have no incentive to make that situation change. Firefox is dealing with it better than before I think, but I won’t hold my breath for parity to ever come.

Try the h264ify extension, it forces h264 video instead of webm, you can block 60fps videos too if you want to halve the size of the download.

If your cpu does not have a webm decoder in hardware, it has to decode them in software which is inefficient.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522

It's pretty bad. Firefox cuts my battery life in half doing nothing.

Also, on my 2-year old MacBook Pro, the thing heats up pretty bad and the fans go on quite loud. It's terrible. I've actually never run any application on my laptop that performs as bad as Firefox, and that's saying something.

There is a significant (maybe 0.4-0.5 seconds?) lag between the cursor hovering over something and it's hover action (highlight, whatever) taking place.

Running my mouse down the list in about:config feels like I'm drunk.

This is on a brand new maxed out i7 MacBook Pro.

As a follow-up, I did a complete reinstall of Firefox with a new profile, removed as much cruft as I could (pocket, etc.), upped the content process limit... and I feel like Firefox is much more usable. There's still some lag, but it's more on the order of 0.05 - 0.1 seconds.

Now if I could just get it to be reasonable about search engines...

GP claims that FF performance is terrible, which I cannot endorse (I guess GP might be having an actual issue), but I'll make a different claim: performance is not as good as Chrome (or maybe even Safari), despite all the accolades of FF Quantum, and my myriad attempts to switch to FF. The (at least perceived) inferiority of performance in addition to general UI ugliness makes it a no switch for me.

P.S. macOS 10.13.6.

funny, I personally find the new Chrome look to be much uglier

When I first saw the Chrome update, I thought: "Hey, it looks just like Firefox!"

Sorry, if that was your thought, I’m afraid all design is probably lost on you. Which might be a blessing, since you can use whatever and can’t tell the difference anyway.

It can be switched back (for now)...

Go to chrome://flags, search for "UI Layout for the browser's top chrome" and pick "Normal". Restart and enjoy the old design.

Same here, almost exclusive FF user on OSX (Sierra) and never had any issues

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