6 ms·

I really want Firefox Quantum to be at least as good as Chrome. But when I tried watching some HTML5 videos, it started using a significant amount of CPU on my

I really want Firefox Quantum to be at least as good as Chrome. But when I tried watching some HTML5 videos, it started using a significant amount of CPU on my Mac and it did not stop. My experience for 3 major browsers on MacOS as follows: - If you want noticeably longer battery life when on the travel. 1- Safari 2- Chrome/Firefox - If you want seamless browsing experience. 1- Chrome 2- Firefox 3- Safari

tokenizerrr 9y ago
Yeah, it's weird. Switched to Firefox Quantum as my main browser again, happened to use Plex and it was slightly laggy with huge cpu usage. Try it in chrome and it's smooth as always.
- tehbeard 9y ago
  I've seen comments that, at least on Linux it might not use GPU acceleration by default?
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    If this is the case for you, hit up `about:config` and change `layers.acceleration.force-enabled` to true. This heavily reduced tearing for me.
    - floatboth 9y ago
      That is a must-enable setting for sure, but not video related. That's compositing. Firefox still does not support VAAPI or VDPAU :(
  - jhasse 9y ago
    It doesn't, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523
caiob 9y ago
Agreed! Video playback is one of the main reasons I keep coming back to Chrome.
scrollaway 9y ago
Quantum has been really good performance wise on most sites. It's most flagrant on the Stripe API docs, which are sluggish as hell on Chrome Linux and butter-smooth on Firefox: https://stripe.com/docs/api https://stripe.com/docs/api However, I have two major tab-management issues with Firefox which make it near-unusable for me: 1. No support for "scroll wheel to switch tabs" (scroll on tabs to switch between them). This is a feature common to nearly all Linux software and Firefox removed it a few versions ago. Quantum killed "Tab Wheel Scroll" which reimplemented it. 2. No support for multi-select tab management, which Chrome is amazing with. If you didn't know, in Chrome, you can ctrl+click and shift+click tabs to select multiple at once and close, move or snap all of them at once like in a file manager. Super useful.
- dewyatt 9y ago
  > sluggish as hell on Chrome Linux and butter-smooth on Firefox: https://stripe.com/docs/api https://stripe.com/docs/api Wow you were not exaggerating on that.
- codelike 9y ago
  Firefox used to have the amazing "Mouse Gestures Suite" add-on, which provides scroll-wheel-in-tabs and rocker navigation. Unfortunately with the new Firefox (since v57) it doesn't work anymore, since it uses the old extension approach. There seems to be a new add-on for the web extension approach (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxy-gestures/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxy-gestures...), but I haven't tested it yet and am not sure how robust it is at this point.
  - anonymousab 9y ago
    There was a custom xpi of mouse gestures redox that has a few more updates, but it's sadly unmaintained and broken in 57. I've yet to find a gesture extension that supports the same rocker gestures (i.e. middle click + other click to change tabs).
  - kk_cz 9y ago
    AFAIK there is currently no extension that would support rocker gestures. Also mouse gestures now have the same annoying "feature" they've always had in Chrome: they don't work in "system" tabs (think about:preferences). So you can't use mouse gesture to quickly go through opened tabs if at least one of them is the "system" one, the navigation simply dies there.
Flott 9y ago
On my mac book pro 2015 and my Mac Mini 2011 I can't watch anything in 1080 (tried Youtube and Twitch) at all with Firefox if I have hardware acceleration enabled. It work just fine in Safari and Chrome will sometime start skipping frames after switching tabs. I find my web browsing experience on Os X quite bad overall.
babuskov 9y ago
I notice when I leave a 2+ hour YouTube video playing in the background, Safari can play 10 of those in a row and still keep usage to 2-3% of CPU. With Firefox something just happens after some time and it starts to 100% one of CPU cores. Not sure if this is something YouTube does or it's a general video playback problem.
- acqq 9y ago
  You "discovered" a problem in Firefox when displaying Youtube or Facebook pages with more than one video, the problem which I mentioned more times on this site. I observed it before FF 57 was released, on different Windows computers but especially catastrophic on the less powerful ones ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15688195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15688195 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15687830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15687830, I've mentioned that I also discovered that there are complaints at least since February this year, https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/5sikxt/firefox_unbearably_slow_on_facebook_and_youtube/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/5sikxt/firefox_unb... only to be downvoted heavily, however let's ignore that at the moment) but now on FF 57 it is provably the same. Just produce a page with more videos autostarting and marvel how much (unbelievably lot!) CPU Firefox uses. 8 videos playing on the page are enough to demonstrate it. Fascinatingly, even if they play somewhere on the page outside of the part which is currently displayed, and even if they are not producing any sound (marked as such) they are going to eat immense amount of CPU.
louhike 9y ago
I've seen a lot of people complaining about that and most of them are on macs. Let's hope it's a bug which will be corrected quickly.
- taurath 9y ago
  I haven’t seen any acknowledgement yet from these threads - there’s been lots of cheerleading, but it’s not usable at all for me.
dopamean 9y ago
This was my exact experience. Last night I also tried to watch something on HBO Now and my fan was whirring so loudly I just stopped and switched back to Chrome. In the case of HBO it was a flash video however I had the same experience on YouTube using HTML5. It was the final straw for a weekend of testing both the desktop and mobile applications. The thing that bugged me about the mobile app was that coming from Chrome it didn't seem to have the same level of integration with my phone. For instance I'd google search something, get the result which included a map, and then the map was not clickable. I expected to be able to tap it and have the map open in Google Maps but no. It was a static image. I had similar experiences with other apps like Twitter, Instagram, and Redfin. I expected a link to the mobile site to launch the installed app on my phone but it never did. I looked around a bit in the settings and couldn't find anything to do it. I'm sure there's a solution for it but I got tired of poking around and went back to what just worked.
maherbeg 9y ago
What sites were you watching video on? I found the h264ify plugin to make a huge difference in performance and battery life watching YouTube in Firefox. I think non accelerated codecs get used otherwise.
- cpeterso 9y ago
  Here is the Firefox bug tracking high CPU usage when playing video on Mac. If you can reproduce high CPU on Mac, please share your Firefox's about:support information in the bug! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1418510 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1418510 VP9 is disabled by default in Firefox on Mac because H.264 can be hardware-accelerated on Mac but VP9 can't. Firefox supports hardware accelerated VP9 on some Windows machines, though.
  - clouddrover 9y ago
    > VP9 is disabled by default in Firefox on Mac That's a setback for royalty-free media formats on the web. Is there a plan for VP9 to be enabled by default again in the future?
em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
> "...on my Mac" Unfortunately 3rd party browsers are at a disadvantage because it is harder to automatically detect and use video acceleration hardware capabilities.
- slobotron 9y ago
  So, Safari on macOS uses private APIs that even programs outside the App Store can't use?
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    Not that. But safari is able to be per-configured to just work for apple's specific chosen hardware. So it is at an advantage in that respect.
- awj 9y ago
  Have anything you can cite to expand on this? That seems like an incredibly basic thing for native applications to not have access to on OS X. (note: not iOS)
- cwzwarich 9y ago
  You get it for free if you use CoreMedia (which is what WebKit does), but you can also use HW video decoding directly: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/technotes/tn2267/_index.html https://developer.apple.com/library/content/technotes/tn2267... The VDADecoderCreate function will return an error if HW video decoding isn't available.
  - jyavenard 9y ago
    VDA framework was made obsolete in OS X. Equivalent features are provided in the Video Toolbox framework from OS X 10.8 and later. Firefox only supports 10.9 and later from now on, and no longer uses VDA. Unlike VDA, when you create a decoder, you just get one. You then query if it's a hardware decoder or not, but the behaviour is fundamentally the same between SW and HW. For some reasons, the VT frame gives us a software decoder most of the time for some users. Until now, I had only ever seen Mac Pro (including 2013 trashcan model) to not provide hardware decoding support. If you attempt to decode a video that is less than 144 pixels high, you always get a software decoder.
bpicolo 9y ago
Have to use Safari/Edge for netflix, otherwise you don't get 1080p. :(
- cpeterso 9y ago
  Yeah, Netflix serves 720p to Firefox and Chrome and 1080p to Safari and Edge because they have hardware-based DRM.
  - bpicolo 9y ago
    4k on Edge, even.
- bwat49 9y ago
  on windows 10 I just use the netflix app
dictum 9y ago
Safari has been my main work browser for a while, and I really like it, but as soon as you need an extension, it's a sad story... It's not that you cannot make good extensions for Safari. Apple closed the doors for non registered (and paying) developers, even for homebrewing extensions for your own use. For instance, there's no good userscripts extension for Safari as of now, and the userstyles extension is adware (randomly opens MacKeeper affiliate tabs: https://github.com/350d/stylish/blob/bc8f01693000cf00421c7b9d40068b47c3d43e49/stylish.safariextension/assets/global.js#L436 https://github.com/350d/stylish/blob/bc8f01693000cf00421c7b9...). The only major complaint I have with Firefox (as of 57) is with openh264. It grabs a whole CPU core for a video that Safari handles at a fourth of that or less.
- jyavenard 9y ago
  OpenH264 is only used with WebRTC video call.. And is a software only decoder/encoder... There shouldn't be much difference for h264 videos between Safari and Firefox, except in Full Screen. For full screen, Safari uses the OS to render the images and can have a very efficient code path. Firefox doesn't support it at all (for now)
pixard 9y ago
Try force enabling media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled -- decreased my CPU usage considerably.
- jyavenard 9y ago
  it won't help on mac... Firefox doesn't use a blacklist of drivers / GPU like it does on window to enable HW decoding or not. Typically mac hardware is far more reliable. the media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled is only of use on Windows in the event a card is blacklisted and you want to override the blacklist
Larrikin 9y ago
What makes Chrome more seamless than Firefox with Sync? I rather enjoy my shared browsing history/stored passwords and being able to send tabs to any device
eridius 9y ago
What does "seamless browsing experience" mean? Because Safari is pretty damn seamless for me, especially with its integration with Safari on iOS.
taurath 9y ago
My CPU spikes to untold levels with Firefox on my MbP and makes the fan run almost constantly. Hasn’t gotten any coverage here as a problem but it’s a clean install.

tokenizerrr 9y ago

Yeah, it's weird. Switched to Firefox Quantum as my main browser again, happened to use Plex and it was slightly laggy with huge cpu usage. Try it in chrome and it's smooth as always.

tehbeard 9y ago
I've seen comments that, at least on Linux it might not use GPU acceleration by default?
- scrollaway 9y ago
  If this is the case for you, hit up `about:config` and change `layers.acceleration.force-enabled` to true. This heavily reduced tearing for me.
  - floatboth 9y ago
    That is a must-enable setting for sure, but not video related. That's compositing. Firefox still does not support VAAPI or VDPAU :(
- jhasse 9y ago
  It doesn't, see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1280523

caiob 9y ago

Agreed! Video playback is one of the main reasons I keep coming back to Chrome.

scrollaway 9y ago

Quantum has been really good performance wise on most sites. It's most flagrant on the Stripe API docs, which are sluggish as hell on Chrome Linux and butter-smooth on Firefox: https://stripe.com/docs/api https://stripe.com/docs/api However, I have two major tab-management issues with Firefox which make it near-unusable for me: 1. No support for "scroll wheel to switch tabs" (scroll on tabs to switch between them). This is a feature common to nearly all Linux software and Firefox removed it a few versions ago. Quantum killed "Tab Wheel Scroll" which reimplemented it. 2. No support for multi-select tab management, which Chrome is amazing with. If you didn't know, in Chrome, you can ctrl+click and shift+click tabs to select multiple at once and close, move or snap all of them at once like in a file manager. Super useful.

dewyatt 9y ago
> sluggish as hell on Chrome Linux and butter-smooth on Firefox: https://stripe.com/docs/api https://stripe.com/docs/api Wow you were not exaggerating on that.
codelike 9y ago
Firefox used to have the amazing "Mouse Gestures Suite" add-on, which provides scroll-wheel-in-tabs and rocker navigation. Unfortunately with the new Firefox (since v57) it doesn't work anymore, since it uses the old extension approach. There seems to be a new add-on for the web extension approach (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxy-gestures/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxy-gestures...), but I haven't tested it yet and am not sure how robust it is at this point.
- anonymousab 9y ago
  There was a custom xpi of mouse gestures redox that has a few more updates, but it's sadly unmaintained and broken in 57. I've yet to find a gesture extension that supports the same rocker gestures (i.e. middle click + other click to change tabs).
- kk_cz 9y ago
  AFAIK there is currently no extension that would support rocker gestures. Also mouse gestures now have the same annoying "feature" they've always had in Chrome: they don't work in "system" tabs (think about:preferences). So you can't use mouse gesture to quickly go through opened tabs if at least one of them is the "system" one, the navigation simply dies there.

Flott 9y ago

On my mac book pro 2015 and my Mac Mini 2011 I can't watch anything in 1080 (tried Youtube and Twitch) at all with Firefox if I have hardware acceleration enabled. It work just fine in Safari and Chrome will sometime start skipping frames after switching tabs. I find my web browsing experience on Os X quite bad overall.

babuskov 9y ago

I notice when I leave a 2+ hour YouTube video playing in the background, Safari can play 10 of those in a row and still keep usage to 2-3% of CPU. With Firefox something just happens after some time and it starts to 100% one of CPU cores. Not sure if this is something YouTube does or it's a general video playback problem.

acqq 9y ago
You "discovered" a problem in Firefox when displaying Youtube or Facebook pages with more than one video, the problem which I mentioned more times on this site. I observed it before FF 57 was released, on different Windows computers but especially catastrophic on the less powerful ones ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15688195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15688195 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15687830 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15687830, I've mentioned that I also discovered that there are complaints at least since February this year, https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/5sikxt/firefox_unbearably_slow_on_facebook_and_youtube/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/5sikxt/firefox_unb... only to be downvoted heavily, however let's ignore that at the moment) but now on FF 57 it is provably the same. Just produce a page with more videos autostarting and marvel how much (unbelievably lot!) CPU Firefox uses. 8 videos playing on the page are enough to demonstrate it. Fascinatingly, even if they play somewhere on the page outside of the part which is currently displayed, and even if they are not producing any sound (marked as such) they are going to eat immense amount of CPU.

louhike 9y ago

I've seen a lot of people complaining about that and most of them are on macs. Let's hope it's a bug which will be corrected quickly.

taurath 9y ago
I haven’t seen any acknowledgement yet from these threads - there’s been lots of cheerleading, but it’s not usable at all for me.

dopamean 9y ago

This was my exact experience. Last night I also tried to watch something on HBO Now and my fan was whirring so loudly I just stopped and switched back to Chrome. In the case of HBO it was a flash video however I had the same experience on YouTube using HTML5. It was the final straw for a weekend of testing both the desktop and mobile applications. The thing that bugged me about the mobile app was that coming from Chrome it didn't seem to have the same level of integration with my phone. For instance I'd google search something, get the result which included a map, and then the map was not clickable. I expected to be able to tap it and have the map open in Google Maps but no. It was a static image. I had similar experiences with other apps like Twitter, Instagram, and Redfin. I expected a link to the mobile site to launch the installed app on my phone but it never did. I looked around a bit in the settings and couldn't find anything to do it. I'm sure there's a solution for it but I got tired of poking around and went back to what just worked.

maherbeg 9y ago

What sites were you watching video on? I found the h264ify plugin to make a huge difference in performance and battery life watching YouTube in Firefox. I think non accelerated codecs get used otherwise.

cpeterso 9y ago
Here is the Firefox bug tracking high CPU usage when playing video on Mac. If you can reproduce high CPU on Mac, please share your Firefox's about:support information in the bug! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1418510 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1418510 VP9 is disabled by default in Firefox on Mac because H.264 can be hardware-accelerated on Mac but VP9 can't. Firefox supports hardware accelerated VP9 on some Windows machines, though.
- clouddrover 9y ago
  > VP9 is disabled by default in Firefox on Mac That's a setback for royalty-free media formats on the web. Is there a plan for VP9 to be enabled by default again in the future?

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago

> "...on my Mac" Unfortunately 3rd party browsers are at a disadvantage because it is harder to automatically detect and use video acceleration hardware capabilities.

slobotron 9y ago
So, Safari on macOS uses private APIs that even programs outside the App Store can't use?
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  Not that. But safari is able to be per-configured to just work for apple's specific chosen hardware. So it is at an advantage in that respect.
awj 9y ago
Have anything you can cite to expand on this? That seems like an incredibly basic thing for native applications to not have access to on OS X. (note: not iOS)
cwzwarich 9y ago
You get it for free if you use CoreMedia (which is what WebKit does), but you can also use HW video decoding directly: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/technotes/tn2267/_index.html https://developer.apple.com/library/content/technotes/tn2267... The VDADecoderCreate function will return an error if HW video decoding isn't available.
- jyavenard 9y ago
  VDA framework was made obsolete in OS X. Equivalent features are provided in the Video Toolbox framework from OS X 10.8 and later. Firefox only supports 10.9 and later from now on, and no longer uses VDA. Unlike VDA, when you create a decoder, you just get one. You then query if it's a hardware decoder or not, but the behaviour is fundamentally the same between SW and HW. For some reasons, the VT frame gives us a software decoder most of the time for some users. Until now, I had only ever seen Mac Pro (including 2013 trashcan model) to not provide hardware decoding support. If you attempt to decode a video that is less than 144 pixels high, you always get a software decoder.

bpicolo 9y ago

Have to use Safari/Edge for netflix, otherwise you don't get 1080p. :(

cpeterso 9y ago
Yeah, Netflix serves 720p to Firefox and Chrome and 1080p to Safari and Edge because they have hardware-based DRM.
- bpicolo 9y ago
  4k on Edge, even.
bwat49 9y ago
on windows 10 I just use the netflix app

dictum 9y ago

Safari has been my main work browser for a while, and I really like it, but as soon as you need an extension, it's a sad story... It's not that you cannot make good extensions for Safari. Apple closed the doors for non registered (and paying) developers, even for homebrewing extensions for your own use. For instance, there's no good userscripts extension for Safari as of now, and the userstyles extension is adware (randomly opens MacKeeper affiliate tabs: https://github.com/350d/stylish/blob/bc8f01693000cf00421c7b9d40068b47c3d43e49/stylish.safariextension/assets/global.js#L436 https://github.com/350d/stylish/blob/bc8f01693000cf00421c7b9...). The only major complaint I have with Firefox (as of 57) is with openh264. It grabs a whole CPU core for a video that Safari handles at a fourth of that or less.

jyavenard 9y ago
OpenH264 is only used with WebRTC video call.. And is a software only decoder/encoder... There shouldn't be much difference for h264 videos between Safari and Firefox, except in Full Screen. For full screen, Safari uses the OS to render the images and can have a very efficient code path. Firefox doesn't support it at all (for now)

pixard 9y ago

Try force enabling media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled -- decreased my CPU usage considerably.

jyavenard 9y ago
it won't help on mac... Firefox doesn't use a blacklist of drivers / GPU like it does on window to enable HW decoding or not. Typically mac hardware is far more reliable. the media.hardware-video-decoding.force-enabled is only of use on Windows in the event a card is blacklisted and you want to override the blacklist

Larrikin 9y ago

What makes Chrome more seamless than Firefox with Sync? I rather enjoy my shared browsing history/stored passwords and being able to send tabs to any device

eridius 9y ago

What does "seamless browsing experience" mean? Because Safari is pretty damn seamless for me, especially with its integration with Safari on iOS.

taurath 9y ago

My CPU spikes to untold levels with Firefox on my MbP and makes the fan run almost constantly. Hasn’t gotten any coverage here as a problem but it’s a clean install.