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Comment by tpetry | Hacker News Reader

I did not have time yet to schow whether the claims are true but i found this when searching why i have insanely high windowserver cpu activity.

Seems chrome on mac is heading into a strange direction. For normal browsing i use safari since a long time as the battery will last the longest compared to firefox and chrome. But the chrome developer tools are so damn good i can‘t get rid of it for development.

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I stumbled on this site last week and anecdotally I can confirm that disabling Keystone helps. I was driven to find answers after no longer being able to hear people on Zoom calls because of the fan noise from my 16" MBP. I got sick of having to wear noise cancelling headphones when Chrome and Zoom turn my laptop into a space heater.

The Keystone thing though, it's not a panacea. It seems to fix the issue with WindowServer running away with the CPU, but Chrome is still pretty terrible. I decided to just deal with the switching cost and stopped using Chrome altogether. It has made all the difference. Switched to Firefox and I'm not looking back.

How do you disable Keystone?

I find Firefox dev tools sufficient pretty much 100% of the time... have you considered it?

I use Firefox as my main browser (and always have -- just to give some context about where I'm coming from). But Firefox's developer tools are just not as good as Chrome's. Again, I use Firefox. But every couple months or so, I stumble upon some annoying instance where its developer tools are either inadequate or are just buggy (whether it's the element inspector not working, or pausing on a debugger statement and not giving me a source view, or applied CSS rules not showing up, or some weird behavior in the console, or...), and I have to resort to using Chrome's developer tools to get the issue resolved. This easily accounts for 90+% of my Chrome usage (i.e. more than the number of times I've had to resort to opening a website in Chrome because the developers didn't test it in Firefox).

Have you used the firefox performance timeline, it is awful. Chrome's performance timeline is amazingly smooth and has much more features.

WindowServer is more than just chrome. I don't doubt chrome is eating the resources on my machine, but it's not as simple as this site makes out.

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