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Comment by madamelic | Hacker News Reader

Firefox is unusable on Ubuntu.

They have a years old bug they can't / won't fix that causes stock Firefox to be at 100% CPU constantly, regardless of what you are running.

I finally switched to Brave and amazingly, it manages to run basic websites at minimal CPU. And it isn't like I am running some rinky-dink computer. I have 32GB of RAM and a Ryzen 9 3900x.

EDIT: Single tab of the front page of reddit, no add-ons, nothing loading, Firefox goes between 7% and 21% CPU. Meanwhile I have 20 tabs open in Brave and it is sipping between 0.7% - 3%.

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> Single tab of the front page of reddit

Not surprising, considering the (new) reddit website has the most bloated, sluggish UI I've ever used. And the only change they made recently made it worse as it added autoplaying livestreams.

Yeah, I may have been purposefully putting my finger on the scale a bit.

google.com was bouncing around 1 and 3%. Firefox becomes unusable for me to do webdev on with multiple tabs if each tab is doing 5%+ each.

You've obviously never used Instacart.

Old Reddit Redirect add on is a requirement for me to browse reddit these days. I imagine they'll turn it off some day and hopefully they will Digg their own grave ;)

I'm using it on Focal and it's fine. Can you link to that bug? Maybe something related to hardware acceleration? I had trouble with that in the past year.

I use Firefox 78 on Ubuntu 19.10 and do not see 100% CPU usage at all. In fact, with over 1000+ tabs all 8 cores are just over 10% (of course there are other processes running as well).

Is there a bug with more details on this?

Curious about this too. I use it on a couple of 18.04 and 20.04 *buntu's, and only occasionally have trouble with it.

I have noticed there are some websites that tend to make it both consume CPU and prevent my machine from screen-blanking, but I find them easily enough with the the diagnostics tool in ff. I don't recall having that problem with Chromium, but I feel like I've given it up for good now.

I use Firefox on Ubuntu and do not have this issue - is there something more specific that triggers this behavior? Have a link to the bug tracker?

No clue to be honest, I just opened it on a single tab of Reddit and it was using high single to double digits of CPU sitting there.

I looked at the bug again with fresh eyes and it seems like there is a deeper issue that may be my fault.

I am running i3-wm and it seems like Firefox gets stuck in a loop if you don't have all the fonts it expects. I had a previous issue where I was crashing my terminal when a program tried to show emojis, which was a legitimately a fun issue to figure out.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495900

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1499385 (not sure if this was the one I saw before giving up + installing Brave, but the fact there are _tons_ of "Firefox hitting 100% cpu" is telling)

Aha, that is something to watch out for, and may explain what I've seen on some websites!

Is it something specific to Ubuntu? I use it on Xubuntu all day, every day, and never see it spike or have problems of any kind. I have a potato.

After looking more, after being prompted for the bug, it may be an issue with Firefox getting stuck in a loop trying to load fonts.

I may work on fixing this locally, but I may just stick with Brave since it works just fine.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1495900

Sorry but that's clearly something on your end, and you know this.

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