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Comment by mosselman | Hacker News Reader

Does this also solve the 100% cpu usage on retina screens and the complete locking of macOS every now and then?

How long does nightly stuff usually take to get into the final release?

The Firefox release schedule is pretty fast. This stuff should be in the beta release due out today, and the stable Firefox 70 release due out October 22.

Thanks!

> How long does nightly stuff usually take to get into the final release?

You can try it out now. Open a terminal:

$ brew cask install firefox-developer-edition

$ cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles

$ ls -l

(Determine which directory is your current profile directory. It should be recently modified and end with .default-release. $ cp -R this directory to .dev-edition-default and start Firefox Developer Edition.)

Then in about:config put gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true.

I have to say that with a lot of tabs Tree Tab Style is still taking up a lot of cycles. Up to the point it (nearly) hangs. At such point, I switch to Sideberry which does not, use OneTab, and start from there. Perhaps setting browser.tabs.20FpsThrobber to true solves this. Trying that out now.

Firefox Developer Edition is not the same as nightly from what I understand.

Setting gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true makes firefox unusable as alerts aren't readable (might be theme dependent).

The only setting that you need to get FF to work on macos with a retina screen is the 'low resolution' mode trick. But then all text, etc isn't as smooth.

I am now running some tests with the new nightly, so far it seems like it fixes the issues and I am very excited about this!

> Firefox Developer Edition is not the same as nightly from what I understand.

It isn't, but this fix has already been around for a while. I've been using it for about a week. Back then, I was advised to run Firefox Developer Edition. I'd rather run that, than Nightlies.

according to @whimboo[0], these specific changes will land later this week on the developer edition.

[0] https://twitter.com/whimboo/status/1168476885766082561

Note the wording: "all of these changes". The first part of the change which I've been using for a week now, is already in Developer Edition. It has the largest effect. The most recent change has a small (but noticeable) effect.

FWIW, Nightly just managed to crash my MBP. Which, for the record, is normally rock stable.

Caveat emptor: You are likely to be running with altered config settings, as indicated by your advice above to others, and it’s occasionally found that about:config changes are what are causing crashes. Consider unwinding your changes to provide a more accurate outcome. (I’m not part of Firefox, just pointing out an especially common expert user self-inflicted issue.)

Thank you for the heads up. It hasn't crashed ever since (the nature of the crash made it appear related to using Nightly). I'll be switching back to Developer Edition ASAP as either b3 or b4 has the same fix.

For anyone interested, here is the firefox release calendar: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar

FWIW, I get the CPU clobbered on a non-retina MacBook air, whereas FF works flawlessly on a retina one.

same here

Have any details? I have a retina screen and don't have any CPU usage issues.

AFAIK, it's a known issue with retina screens and scaled resolutions. If you use the default resolution, you should not see any issue.

The default resolution has been a scaled resolution for years now.

I think GP means non-integer scaling

So do I. My MacBook Pro came out of the box supersampling at 3360x2100, or 1680x1050@2x. The screen is only 2880x1800.

There are many bugreports known to Mozilla already. Here's mine: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407536

Never had this problem. At worst some pages manage to spin up my fans.

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