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Comment by bluenose69 | Hacker News Reader

I have this and Safari both open to github.com on my macos box. This site has an animation showing recent github activity on a globe. It's coded in javascript, AFAIK.

Firefox is using 55% of my CPU, whilst Safari is using 3%.

As someone who used Firefox exclusively back in the day (and mozilla before that), I will continue to try tests like this every time a new Firefox is released. Maybe, someday, the energy contrast will be less dramatically in Safari's favour, and I'll switch back to Firefox.

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I did the same test on my M1 Air. Safari is using 40% CPU while Firefox is 55%. Not sure why there's such a large difference between your results and mine.

Maybe it's running on a low power core?

Another M1 datapoint,

Chrome: ~20% Safari: ~35% Firefox: ~45%

My guess is that the OP doesn't have hardware acceleration for Firefox on his GPU configuration. You probably don't either with your numbers. I have about 3-4% CPU usage on GitHub.com using Firefox, and my GPU is at about 20% load from the 3D being drawn.

after reading your comment I checked again and realized that activity monitor has a column for %GPU as well under the CPU tab. So here's the eyeball average after watching the GitHub page for about a minute.

Firefox 88 (no extensions, private mode):

CPU% 55 (avg) 61 (peak)

GPU% 65 (avg) 77 (peak)

Safari (no extensions):

CPU% 33 (avg) 40 (peak)

GPU% 33 (avg) 40 (peak) <- same numbers for both CPU and GPU in safari.

I remember creating a moderately large spreadsheet in Google Docs last year. Safari unloaded the page and forced a refresh every time I switched away. Firefox would hang recomputing formulas and only Chrome scaled well.

I'm looking to move to Safari by default. I just need to get over some UI differences. It drives me nuts that Firefox doesn't use the native context menus (I use "Look Up" constantly) and Text Shortcuts don't work. There's a bug for this filed literally 20 years ago.

Each browser has different trade offs and those may not change over time. I'm glad Safari fits your needs.

With Google services specifically, it might be Google shenanigans at play rather than the other two browsers being genuinely inferior.

I just recently found out, you can use "Look Up" on Firefox for Macs, by tapping a word (or highlighted text) with three fingers on the trackpad.

Any docs or more info on this? Its not working for me.

I found it! It's the "Look up & data detectors" setting under System Preferences > Trackpad. For whatever reason mine was set to "Force Click with one finger" which I never use and had trouble consistently activating. The other option is "Tap with three fingers."

⌘-^-D the keyboard shortcut also works.

Firefox has had some bugs around this.

https://superuser.com/questions/1138014/how-to-use-three-fin...

Windows 10 here.

Chrome ~2.5% https://streamable.com/flb8rh

Firefox ~3.5% https://streamable.com/dkrp0w

Manjaro Linux, XFCE on an (old!!) i7-4770 at github.com:

- Chrome 5-8%

- Firefox 6-7%

This is a nice simple test.

But note for others: you need to be logged out of GitHub to see the animation. Or open GitHub in a private window.

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