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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Still no update on super-high CPU usage of Twitch on Firefox, an issue that has been open for at least 4 years [1][2].

I really want to like Firefox and I want there to be viable alternatives to Chrome but when playing video back at 360p (not joking) grinds my 1.5 year old Macbook Pro to a halt on a popular website... I just can't use it.

I don't know if this is a video codec issue, a CSS/JS issue that Twitch manages to trigger or what but it's a problem.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1403823

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/917hyv/twitch_in_f...

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A good way to get traction on a Firefox performance bug is to provide a profile. You don't need to install any new software. Instructions for recording a Firefox performance profile:

https://profiler.firefox.com/

Is it multi-user video chat? Firefox can't do this efficiently and it's also a problem with other tools like Jitsi.

Well, that's worse because it's a bigger issue. If you look through some of the bugs (there are several) you'll see suggestions of turning off chat to mitigate the issue but this raises even more questions:

1. Why don't users have to do that with Chrome?

2. While it does help, the video-without-chat CPU+GPU usage is still higher than Chrome's CPU+GPU usage for video-with-chat.

If that also applies to Youtube or other services and has been open for 4+ years then... yeah, big problem.

Isn’t this something that Twitch could/should fix?

Non-solution, but have you seen https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink-twitch-gui? It runs natively using streamlink, and streamlink can use e.g. mpv and use minimal CPU, instead using hardware acceleration (or not run whatever JavaScript Twitch decides to run, at least).

Workaround, but I use mpv with youtube-dl. Offers rewinding, pausing (buffering for minutes), frame-by-frame stepping, slow motion.. You can just type `mpv http://twitch.tv/user_name`

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