Firefox feels very fast and doesn't lag while being used, but the unnecessary CPU spikes kill my battery. We're talking about one page open at about:blank with no extensions and a completely fresh profile spiking to 20% CPU usage every 10 or so seconds.
It kind of surprises me that this is an issue at all. I was under the impression a large number of FF devs use Macbooks.
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The discussion is all specific to that page. The biggest issue is that the animations are being driven from Javascript instead of CSS, so there's little we can do to optimize it.
The rest of the discussion is possible heuristics we can implement to optimize how we layerize the page. It would potentially help on this page, but might make things slower elsewhere.
That bug refers to high cpu load on that page. On that page it is due to the animation being driven from javascript.
If a simple CSS animation causes high cpu usage please file a separate bug with an attached test case.
Don’t you think it’s more likely there is a bug in macOS-specific Firefox code?
If I had to guess I would chalk it up to a qc issue on some Apple specific chipset that just doesn't get hit by the other browsers code paths and just doesn't get noticed in other less used, less intensive apps.
How to diagnose it or work around it is beyond me.
I run Arch Linux on this exact hardware and Firefox runs amazingly well there. It only runs like crap under macOS, which makes me think there's something with macOS specifically that's going on there.
Such a two week period has just ended, and while FF does feel snappier than before, I'm running into exactly the issues you describe. When using Firefox, my four-year old MacBook Air pretty regularly slows down to the point where my music starts stuttering and even force-closing FF takes a while. I've had bluetooth devices disconnect too.
Now if it was just that, I could perhaps accept that maybe my laptop just can't handle my browsing behavior anymore. Unfortunately the same thing happens on my 16GB RAM Mac Mini. Not as often, but still.
I don't have these problems with Chrome, even when I clearly have too many tabs open for my memory to handle. Occasionally my music will stutter when I open multiple gmail tabs in Safari (I use Safari for stuff like email and banking), but it's rare, and nothing like what happens with Firefox.
Thing is, it's not even that I have so many tabs open. It's always been fewer than Chrome, and with fewer active extensions to boot. Furthermore, it also happens on my other computer. The other one has 16 Gb of RAM, so it can handle quite a bit more, but the problem happens often enough that I also switched back to Chrome there.
At work, I have several GUIs in browsers that I access through Chrome, and they cause instant 3+ GB of usage. I can't test FF due to group policy, but anyway, Chrome can be a hog, too.
Are you saying that those same half dozen apps, when pinned in Chrome, do not cause any RAM issues for you?
Has been working just fine here for 7-9mo since I got it (not on the latest latest, but this sounds like an ongoing issue)
Agree it's weird.
Really hoping this gets sorted out soon, because on most other counts I prefer the current Firefox to Chrome. (The other thing keeping me on Chrome is pinch-to-zoom support.)
What specific problems are you seeing?
I check this every time a new version is released as I'd love to make the switch from Chrome, but Firefox with one blank tab and no extensions uses more CPU than Chrome with 15 actual tabs. When I actually throw activity at Firefox it hogs the CPU even more.
Here's hoping v61 addresses it.