15 ms·

Great release. I had issues with previous releases (58-60) on MBP, where quite a lot of pages would cause high CPU usage and in turn overheating of the machine

Great release. I had issues with previous releases (58-60) on MBP, where quite a lot of pages would cause high CPU usage and in turn overheating of the machine but after this upgrade the problem (at least it seems so) went away. And it also feels snappier. And now the dark theme also applies to address bar and hamburger menu which is nice bonus.

woumn 8y ago
Out of curiosity, were these high CPU usages on pages with any sort of video playing (culprits for me were Twitch or any live stream)? I was also having these issues, and I want to use Firefox, but the performance in the past was just too difficult.
- txcwpalpha 8y ago
  I had the same issues and avoided FF 57+ because of it. I just tried FF 61 and my results were mixed. Twitch and Youtube still made my CPU temps spike a little bit. It seems worse than Chrome but better than FF 57. Google Maps, unfortunately, still made my CPU temp spike 30C+ as soon as I opened it. I use Maps a lot, so this is still a deal breaker for me.
  - woumn 8y ago
    Yea, most of my browser time spent during free time is strictly on Twitch/Youtube/Netflix. Until these see improvements, then I won't make the switch.
    - Royalaid 8y ago
      I am also in this camp and want to say that twitch especially is just horrible for performance
      - woumn 8y ago
        Which is so surprising to me because it's using the HTML5 video player and toggling around with hardware acceleration does nothing to fix the issue. Perhaps it's the integrated chat + any of the add ones that Twitch has written for the videos?
        kup0 8y ago
        I have noticed the pop-out player seems far more efficient, which leads me to think the chat and other things going on around the video might be the culprit
    - Klover 8y ago
      Unrelated, but what do people do on twitch? I worry about getting out of touch with my children.
      - FreeFull 8y ago
        Twitch is mostly people streaming video of themselves playing games, but there are also some programmers that stream as they write software.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - 1011_1101 8y ago
        In addition to FreeFulls comment, there are also talkshows/(video)podcasts. It's basically the main broadcasting platform for gamers and tech people.
    - tostr 8y ago
      I only use firefox (for privacy reasons). But the macbook-burning-a-hole-in-my-pants behaviour that firefox creates on these sites has led me to using mpv with youtube-dl to watch most of youtube and all of twitch. If you have both installed you can just do a 'mpv https://www.twitch.tv/username' https://www.twitch.tv/username' and it will work quite nicely. You might need to set up mpv to get the best quality, I think putting 'ytdl-format=bestvideo+bestaudio/best' in ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf is sufficient. HTH.
  - kup0 8y ago
    Glad it's not just me. All of those really seem to stress Firefox out on my iMac. Chrome is far more efficient with something like Twitch. Interesting thing I've noticed: If you don't use chat much and just want the video, try using Twitch's "pop-out" player that opens in its own window- for me this uses far less CPU (even in Chrome) Chrome's "switch to fullscreen" transition on twitch for me is super laggy though, and I haven't been able to solve that one (Firefox switches to fullscreen smoothly).
- daveslash 8y ago
  Video has been a big culprit for me - in both FireFox and Chrome. I've actually taken to using Microsoft Edge when I plan to play video.
  - woumn 8y ago
    I use Opera as my personal browser and it handles video pretty well. It's running Chromium under the hood, and I don't think any major improvements have been made for video in Chromium or in any of the standards like HTML5 or flash. I see on par performance to stock Chrome.
- ktosobcy 8y ago
  I would lean towards "yes". Mostly problematic pages: YouTube and Twilio dashboard.
adpirz 8y ago
If this is true, I would finally be ready to dump Chrome. I had the same issues, and I couldn't figure out what was causing it, but the app regularly ran hot. Will give this round a go. UPDATE: So far, so good! Multiple account containers open, lots of different websites that usually would cause problems, and so far it's running fine! Also had Ghostery left installed and uninstalled that as well as it also hogged CPU time on Chrome, so that may have had an effect. All in all, think this is g'bye, Chrome.
- woumn 8y ago
  Could you please report back with your findings? I'm also terribly interested in this as well.
  - adpirz 8y ago
    Just updated!
- kemayo 8y ago
  Sort of tangential, but as an account-containers user, have you found a decent way to achieve making the current container "sticky", so that new tabs opened in a given window go directly to that container? I currently use Chrome's account profiles for this, so I have a desktop where my work profile lives and a desktop where my personal profile lives, and this makes links followed from other applications Just Work so long as I'm on the right desktop for them. I could probably get used to a slightly more awkward workflow, and the history being annoyingly shared between them, but... EDIT: ah, well, I found the relevant github issue. Looks like there's years of arguing yet to go! https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/319 https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/3...
  - snthd 8y ago
    Firefox can already run multiple profiles simultaneously (like you do with chrome) http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments . The problem is not having just one instance open all the links. It seems it might be possible to hack around that by writing your own url handler for your os, then dispatching to the correct instance. (https://superuser.com/questions/119014/how-to-remotely-open-an-url-in-firefox-in-a-specific-profile/141350 https://superuser.com/questions/119014/how-to-remotely-open-...)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
xoa 8y ago
My personal test case will be with the UniFi 5.7/5.8 Controller web interface page. I've found consistently under the last few versions of Firefox that, while it's fine for at least an hour, if I leave it up constantly for ease of monitoring then after a day or two the Firefox process inevitably ends up pegging an entire core. There is no video whatsoever or any particularly fancy graphical usage, and while they may be doing something odd internally (I haven't had time to really dig into it) I'm not sure Firefox should end up in that state there over time. It's relatively easily repeatable though (will take a day but requires no interaction on my part) so I look forward to testing it. Although if it does resolve the problem I'll be mildly bummed whatever fix it was didn't make it into ESR, but so it goes.
- woumn 8y ago
  That sounds like the developers messed up some Javascript references that are unable to be cleaned up to me. But interesting nonetheless.
  - specialist 8y ago
    Memory leaks can be hard to track down. After weeks of effort, a team mate finally figured out that a default noop function param, eg function blah( param = () => {} ), was never being gc’d. Wut?!
    - bzbarsky 8y ago
      Was it getting captured by a closure being returned from the function, with that closure never getting gced? But yes, in general tracking down leaks in JS is a huge pain...
      - jvilk 8y ago
        I recently wrote an automatic memory leak detector and debugger, which makes this a lot easier (imo) [0]. You write a short input script that drives the UI in some loop, it looks for growing things (objects, arrays, event listener lists, DOM node lists...), and then collects stack traces to find the code that grew them. While it won't find all of the leaks, I was able to eliminate an average of 94% of the live heap growth I observed in 5 web applications (which found new memory leaks in Google Analytics, AngularJS, Google Maps, etc). More information about the technique can be found in a PLDI paper (which I presented last week :D ), which I tried to write clearly so that it is accessible to a technical audience (i.e., non-academics) [1]. [0] http://bleak-detector.org/ http://bleak-detector.org/ [1] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3192366.3192376 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3192366.3192376 (shouldn't be paywalled, but if it is, it's also available at [0])
geist 8y ago
Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be the case for me. I've been wanting to switch back to FF for some time but just opening a website causes my MBP CPU to go nuts, seems 61 is no different for me.
- some_account 8y ago
  Sounds like your computer. :)
  - woumn 8y ago
    I saw the same issues and I'm using a 2017 MBP 15" with the middle of the road CPU and 16GB RAM (dedicated GPU as well).
- taf2 8y ago
  For me it just consistently hovers around 18% cpu. Chrome on the same site sites around 1%... could it be optimized for memory usage isn’t always better if it means more cpu usage?
  - FactolSarin 8y ago
    I'm at 2% right now typing this comment. Might be worth checking your add-ons.
    - taf2 8y ago
      I always run stock browsers. Usually in FF on OS X any kind of css animation is very cpu intensive.
- xenophonf 8y ago
  You wouldn't happen to be running Tab Session Manager, would you? That was causing me all sorts of performance problems on both PCs and Macs, and I only tracked it down by disabling all extensions and themes and then incrementally re-enabling them.
stouset 8y ago
I also had that, and it finally appears to be gone! On the other hand, everything is blurry. I've searched to no end, and haven't found a solution. It looks like third-party apps used to when the rMBP was first released and apps that performed their own text rendering hadn't yet been updated to support it. Any ideas? Edit: I have no idea how this was even ever set in the first place, but a sibling comment mentioned the "Open in Low Resolution" flag that can be set on a binary, and it was enabled for Firefox on my machine. Either I set this manually trying to solve the performance issues (and somehow this setting persisted across uninstalls), or Firefox ships with this flag set. Unchecking it fixed the blurriness, and hopefully didn't bring back the performance problems.
- kup0 8y ago
  It might have persisted across uninstalls (browser profiles often do), because people were suggesting the "open in low resolution" flag as a temporary fix for Firefox performance issues on Macs prior to v61 being released.
fwdpropaganda 8y ago
> And now the dark theme also applies to address bar and hamburger menu which is nice bonus. I have both normal FF and nightly FF. Before nightly getting the dark hamburger menu I'd never thought much of it. After nightly got the dark menu, now on normal FF I can't help but notice it every time I open the menu, and it annoys me to no end. Funny how these things work.
cptskippy 8y ago
They need to better staging these releases so that the lap warmer releases occur in fall and winter and these cooler releases start in early spring.
- ktosobcy 8y ago
  I'll bite - not everyone lives in Northern hemispere so for me (winter just started) it's perfect <s/>
shock 8y ago
I wouldn't call it a great release. For me Firefox is unresponsive sometimes for literally minutes. I click on another tab and it takes minutes to switch to it. I just had it happen before posting this comment. I also took a perf profile and asked the people in #perf to look at it but nobody did. So no, I wouldn't call this a great release.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  Firefox has tools to figure out which tabs are causing problems, try about:performance. Any freeze of minutes is generally caused by a memory leak in the javascript of a particular page.
  - kemayo 8y ago
    I thought the recent work on multi-process stuff would have gotten rid of that? The browser chrome not being affected by in-page issues seems like a fairly important goal there...
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    >about:performance // Where's that in the menus?
    - untog 8y ago
      It's a URL
  - shock 8y ago
    I did look in about:performance, nothing obvious was there. I think it's rather because I have many tabs, not because of a specific tab.
    - computerfriend 8y ago
      I have about 200 tabs on my work machine and something even worse on my personal one and have never seen this, so unless you're a serious tab hoarder I doubt it's that.
teilo 8y ago
Yes, so far so good. This is the page I always test for Firefox CPU usage: https://flypaper.soundfly.com/ https://flypaper.soundfly.com/ I don't visit this site, but on a past Google hit, I discovered that it would make Firefox go crazy. No idea why.
kup0 8y ago
Yes, 60 was giving me some performance troubles on iMac. Excited to see if 61 resolves them.

woumn 8y ago

Out of curiosity, were these high CPU usages on pages with any sort of video playing (culprits for me were Twitch or any live stream)? I was also having these issues, and I want to use Firefox, but the performance in the past was just too difficult.

txcwpalpha 8y ago
I had the same issues and avoided FF 57+ because of it. I just tried FF 61 and my results were mixed. Twitch and Youtube still made my CPU temps spike a little bit. It seems worse than Chrome but better than FF 57. Google Maps, unfortunately, still made my CPU temp spike 30C+ as soon as I opened it. I use Maps a lot, so this is still a deal breaker for me.
- woumn 8y ago
  Yea, most of my browser time spent during free time is strictly on Twitch/Youtube/Netflix. Until these see improvements, then I won't make the switch.
  - Royalaid 8y ago
    I am also in this camp and want to say that twitch especially is just horrible for performance
    - woumn 8y ago
      Which is so surprising to me because it's using the HTML5 video player and toggling around with hardware acceleration does nothing to fix the issue. Perhaps it's the integrated chat + any of the add ones that Twitch has written for the videos?
      - kup0 8y ago
        I have noticed the pop-out player seems far more efficient, which leads me to think the chat and other things going on around the video might be the culprit
  - Klover 8y ago
    Unrelated, but what do people do on twitch? I worry about getting out of touch with my children.
    - FreeFull 8y ago
      Twitch is mostly people streaming video of themselves playing games, but there are also some programmers that stream as they write software.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - 1011_1101 8y ago
      In addition to FreeFulls comment, there are also talkshows/(video)podcasts. It's basically the main broadcasting platform for gamers and tech people.
  - tostr 8y ago
    I only use firefox (for privacy reasons). But the macbook-burning-a-hole-in-my-pants behaviour that firefox creates on these sites has led me to using mpv with youtube-dl to watch most of youtube and all of twitch. If you have both installed you can just do a 'mpv https://www.twitch.tv/username' https://www.twitch.tv/username' and it will work quite nicely. You might need to set up mpv to get the best quality, I think putting 'ytdl-format=bestvideo+bestaudio/best' in ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf is sufficient. HTH.
- kup0 8y ago
  Glad it's not just me. All of those really seem to stress Firefox out on my iMac. Chrome is far more efficient with something like Twitch. Interesting thing I've noticed: If you don't use chat much and just want the video, try using Twitch's "pop-out" player that opens in its own window- for me this uses far less CPU (even in Chrome) Chrome's "switch to fullscreen" transition on twitch for me is super laggy though, and I haven't been able to solve that one (Firefox switches to fullscreen smoothly).
daveslash 8y ago
Video has been a big culprit for me - in both FireFox and Chrome. I've actually taken to using Microsoft Edge when I plan to play video.
- woumn 8y ago
  I use Opera as my personal browser and it handles video pretty well. It's running Chromium under the hood, and I don't think any major improvements have been made for video in Chromium or in any of the standards like HTML5 or flash. I see on par performance to stock Chrome.
ktosobcy 8y ago
I would lean towards "yes". Mostly problematic pages: YouTube and Twilio dashboard.

adpirz 8y ago

If this is true, I would finally be ready to dump Chrome. I had the same issues, and I couldn't figure out what was causing it, but the app regularly ran hot. Will give this round a go. UPDATE: So far, so good! Multiple account containers open, lots of different websites that usually would cause problems, and so far it's running fine! Also had Ghostery left installed and uninstalled that as well as it also hogged CPU time on Chrome, so that may have had an effect. All in all, think this is g'bye, Chrome.

woumn 8y ago
Could you please report back with your findings? I'm also terribly interested in this as well.
- adpirz 8y ago
  Just updated!
kemayo 8y ago
Sort of tangential, but as an account-containers user, have you found a decent way to achieve making the current container "sticky", so that new tabs opened in a given window go directly to that container? I currently use Chrome's account profiles for this, so I have a desktop where my work profile lives and a desktop where my personal profile lives, and this makes links followed from other applications Just Work so long as I'm on the right desktop for them. I could probably get used to a slightly more awkward workflow, and the history being annoyingly shared between them, but... EDIT: ah, well, I found the relevant github issue. Looks like there's years of arguing yet to go! https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/319 https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/3...
- snthd 8y ago
  Firefox can already run multiple profiles simultaneously (like you do with chrome) http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments http://kb.mozillazine.org/Command_line_arguments . The problem is not having just one instance open all the links. It seems it might be possible to hack around that by writing your own url handler for your os, then dispatching to the correct instance. (https://superuser.com/questions/119014/how-to-remotely-open-an-url-in-firefox-in-a-specific-profile/141350 https://superuser.com/questions/119014/how-to-remotely-open-...)

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

xoa 8y ago

My personal test case will be with the UniFi 5.7/5.8 Controller web interface page. I've found consistently under the last few versions of Firefox that, while it's fine for at least an hour, if I leave it up constantly for ease of monitoring then after a day or two the Firefox process inevitably ends up pegging an entire core. There is no video whatsoever or any particularly fancy graphical usage, and while they may be doing something odd internally (I haven't had time to really dig into it) I'm not sure Firefox should end up in that state there over time. It's relatively easily repeatable though (will take a day but requires no interaction on my part) so I look forward to testing it. Although if it does resolve the problem I'll be mildly bummed whatever fix it was didn't make it into ESR, but so it goes.

woumn 8y ago
That sounds like the developers messed up some Javascript references that are unable to be cleaned up to me. But interesting nonetheless.
- specialist 8y ago
  Memory leaks can be hard to track down. After weeks of effort, a team mate finally figured out that a default noop function param, eg function blah( param = () => {} ), was never being gc’d. Wut?!
  - bzbarsky 8y ago
    Was it getting captured by a closure being returned from the function, with that closure never getting gced? But yes, in general tracking down leaks in JS is a huge pain...
    - jvilk 8y ago
      I recently wrote an automatic memory leak detector and debugger, which makes this a lot easier (imo) [0]. You write a short input script that drives the UI in some loop, it looks for growing things (objects, arrays, event listener lists, DOM node lists...), and then collects stack traces to find the code that grew them. While it won't find all of the leaks, I was able to eliminate an average of 94% of the live heap growth I observed in 5 web applications (which found new memory leaks in Google Analytics, AngularJS, Google Maps, etc). More information about the technique can be found in a PLDI paper (which I presented last week :D ), which I tried to write clearly so that it is accessible to a technical audience (i.e., non-academics) [1]. [0] http://bleak-detector.org/ http://bleak-detector.org/ [1] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3192366.3192376 https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3192366.3192376 (shouldn't be paywalled, but if it is, it's also available at [0])

geist 8y ago

Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be the case for me. I've been wanting to switch back to FF for some time but just opening a website causes my MBP CPU to go nuts, seems 61 is no different for me.

some_account 8y ago
Sounds like your computer. :)
- woumn 8y ago
  I saw the same issues and I'm using a 2017 MBP 15" with the middle of the road CPU and 16GB RAM (dedicated GPU as well).
taf2 8y ago
For me it just consistently hovers around 18% cpu. Chrome on the same site sites around 1%... could it be optimized for memory usage isn’t always better if it means more cpu usage?
- FactolSarin 8y ago
  I'm at 2% right now typing this comment. Might be worth checking your add-ons.
  - taf2 8y ago
    I always run stock browsers. Usually in FF on OS X any kind of css animation is very cpu intensive.
xenophonf 8y ago
You wouldn't happen to be running Tab Session Manager, would you? That was causing me all sorts of performance problems on both PCs and Macs, and I only tracked it down by disabling all extensions and themes and then incrementally re-enabling them.

stouset 8y ago

I also had that, and it finally appears to be gone! On the other hand, everything is blurry. I've searched to no end, and haven't found a solution. It looks like third-party apps used to when the rMBP was first released and apps that performed their own text rendering hadn't yet been updated to support it. Any ideas? Edit: I have no idea how this was even ever set in the first place, but a sibling comment mentioned the "Open in Low Resolution" flag that can be set on a binary, and it was enabled for Firefox on my machine. Either I set this manually trying to solve the performance issues (and somehow this setting persisted across uninstalls), or Firefox ships with this flag set. Unchecking it fixed the blurriness, and hopefully didn't bring back the performance problems.

kup0 8y ago
It might have persisted across uninstalls (browser profiles often do), because people were suggesting the "open in low resolution" flag as a temporary fix for Firefox performance issues on Macs prior to v61 being released.

fwdpropaganda 8y ago

> And now the dark theme also applies to address bar and hamburger menu which is nice bonus. I have both normal FF and nightly FF. Before nightly getting the dark hamburger menu I'd never thought much of it. After nightly got the dark menu, now on normal FF I can't help but notice it every time I open the menu, and it annoys me to no end. Funny how these things work.

cptskippy 8y ago

They need to better staging these releases so that the lap warmer releases occur in fall and winter and these cooler releases start in early spring.

ktosobcy 8y ago
I'll bite - not everyone lives in Northern hemispere so for me (winter just started) it's perfect <s/>

shock 8y ago

I wouldn't call it a great release. For me Firefox is unresponsive sometimes for literally minutes. I click on another tab and it takes minutes to switch to it. I just had it happen before posting this comment. I also took a perf profile and asked the people in #perf to look at it but nobody did. So no, I wouldn't call this a great release.

greglindahl 8y ago
Firefox has tools to figure out which tabs are causing problems, try about:performance. Any freeze of minutes is generally caused by a memory leak in the javascript of a particular page.
- kemayo 8y ago
  I thought the recent work on multi-process stuff would have gotten rid of that? The browser chrome not being affected by in-page issues seems like a fairly important goal there...
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  >about:performance // Where's that in the menus?
  - untog 8y ago
    It's a URL
- shock 8y ago
  I did look in about:performance, nothing obvious was there. I think it's rather because I have many tabs, not because of a specific tab.
  - computerfriend 8y ago
    I have about 200 tabs on my work machine and something even worse on my personal one and have never seen this, so unless you're a serious tab hoarder I doubt it's that.

teilo 8y ago

Yes, so far so good. This is the page I always test for Firefox CPU usage: https://flypaper.soundfly.com/ https://flypaper.soundfly.com/ I don't visit this site, but on a past Google hit, I discovered that it would make Firefox go crazy. No idea why.

kup0 8y ago

Yes, 60 was giving me some performance troubles on iMac. Excited to see if 61 resolves them.