8 ms·

Too bad it completely kills your CPU on a Mac. I tried switching completely a month ago for the third time. Sadly absolutely nothing has happened in a 5 year

Too bad it completely kills your CPU on a Mac. I tried switching completely a month ago for the third time. Sadly absolutely nothing has happened in a 5 year time-span. The performance on my high-spec i7 Macbook Pro is abysmal. ( same across several company Macbooks ) The fans speed up constantly like they have done it for years. It's completely unusable for "professional" work or just regular multi tab browsing and drains the battery in no time. Safari, Chrome, Opera, whatever, doesn't have these problems. I actually haven't experienced an application that feels so sluggish and unoptimised in OSX as Firefox. Something is seriously wrong and the dev group must not be prioritising it? I checked their subreddit and loads of people are fleeing the Mac version, even on the newest nightly builds of quantum - seriously what the hell is going on? Why hasn't "the bug" or whatever been found or defined in clear termes in over 5 years? The day the app works without serious CPU issues i will uninstall Chrome and go to Firefox, but the handling of this problem makes me worried about the dev groups competence. When i talked to devs in the subreddit many of them were like "Hey, that sounds weird, should be better in the new nightly, are you sure it's not ..." - an absurd answer in the light of the constant stream of people saying this for years and years - even in this thread i see multiple people saying it's useless on OSX. To the dev group: Get a Macbook (many devs use them), open Firefox, identify the problem - should have happened 5+ years ago.

inferiorhuman 8y ago
I use the nightly builds and I definitely do not have that problem with around 750 tabs open on my non-retina MacBook Pro. It does suck down memory though.
- kossTKR 8y ago
  Which doesn't change anything since the Macbook Pro has been sold with Retina displays for what, the last 6 years? The fact that Firefox works exclusively on ancient laptops or edge cases doesn't make anything better. All Apple devices today are sold with Retina screens and the Pro Lineup, and therefore most devs has had Retina screens for 6+ years.
  - inferiorhuman 8y ago
    Sure, it's a mid-2012 MBP with the "high res" matte screen. A six year old machine is hardly an edge case in the context of a problem you've been seeing for at least five years. I've not had problems with FF performance on the handful of retina machines I've used for work either. If the Mozilla devs aren't paying attention to and haven't remedied the problem you're experiencing, perhaps you're the edge case?
    - kossTKR 8y ago
      What? I just wrote that their support subreddit is filled with posts about performance on OSX, this thread in itself already has loads of posts with people complaining about it, and my post just is getting lots of upvotes - how is that an edge case? Also all Firefox threads on Hackernews has these posts, every single one. As i said before i have been following this for years. You having a 2012 computer is 100% the edge case - not that there is anything wrong in that, i love keeping tech for as long as possible.
      - 1996 8y ago
        There is no excuse for firefox bad performance on decent hard. And such "old" computers are not edge cases! Any Sandy Bridge i7 from 2012 easily outperforms most odern laptops. There is some progress made in performance per watt, but raw performance strongly decrease after the 39xx series.
      - inferiorhuman 8y ago
        > You having a 2012 computer is 100% the edge case How so? It's the same processor (Ivy Bridge) and GPU combo (HD 4000 + GT 650M) as the first few revisions of the retina MBP models. The big difference is the display resolution (1680x1050 vs 2880x1800). You're saying this problem goes back five years (2013). Whether or not the 2012 model is particularly common now, the guts were common in 2013 back when you claim to have seen the problem. I've got a newer (still non-retina) iMac and have used a variety of retina machines for work and haven't seen any performance problems with FF either. Sure, if I run a bunch of flash based video players I can get the fans to go nuts but that's not a FF problem (the same thing happens if I use Chrome, flash is just an inefficient means of rendering video). If the Mozilla devs haven't reproduced your complaint on a first class platform it's a pretty safe bet that you're doing something whacky whether or not you realize it.
nindalf 8y ago
FWIW I’ve used it on a low spec MacBook Pro for a year and a half without a problem. Never had any complaints, and it’s only gotten better after the Quantum changes.
1ris 8y ago
I have no idea what you people are doing. I use FF with my mid spec, 4th generation i5 with 500+ tabs and haven't experienced any of your problems.
- stdclass 8y ago
  I had the exact same experience as the grand parent comment. Seriously wanted to switch to Firefox after the browser-sign-in "feature" but the performance on my high-end 2018 macbook pro with 16gb ram was just abysmal (20 tabs open tops).
  - hellofunk 8y ago
    Do you use your Mac with the default screen resolution setting, or have you tweaked that setting?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - stdclass 8y ago
      I also use the "more space" setting. Haven't tried it with the normal scaling though.
      - hellofunk 8y ago
        In my case I am actually going in the other direction, towards the "larger text" scaling.
- kossTKR 8y ago
  I think there should be some kind of survey. Every thread on HN has these posts complaining about this problem, and every thread has people like you insinuating we are doing something "whacky" or "crazy" with our laptops. To me it seems that a large segment of users using the Retina screens (most people on the osx platform) has severe performance problems. Some people have no problems. And that is just the state of affairs. The weird thing for me is that there is no official "issue" or information about the problems since so many experience it.
nishanmiranda 8y ago
I have been using Firefox on my Macbook Pro 2015 for the past years without any problems and seriously it consumes a lot less memory compared with chrome
daxhuiberts 8y ago
I have the exact same issue. I'm using a fully specced MacBook Pro early 2015 with a Retina screen in a scaled mode (1.5x) and Firefox is extremely slow to use. Scrolling isn't fluid at all and CPU usage is very high. When I put it in the normal Retina mode (2x) it's much better, but still not as fluid as using Chrome, which even on 1.5x mode works and scrolls fluidly. I'm also using Firefox on an underpowered Ubuntu machine and it works wonderfully there though (no HiDPI screen).
cheeze 8y ago
Firefox has never been good on Mac. It kills me :(
raverbashing 8y ago
Interesting. Works fine here 1st step to trying to debug would be removing your old profile completely, maybe try to disable extensions and HW rendering acceleration
- kossTKR 8y ago
  Thanks but check out the other comments, or their subreddit, or any other HN FF thread. Many people have this problem. Also i am a dev - i have tried all possible options to remedy this issue. I even wrote that i talked to FF devs directly. Wouldn't it be weird if i hadn't tried basic techniques? It's like there is this weird tribal thing going on where there is this passive aggressive attitude towards the people having problems like "you guys must be idiots" even though there is dozens of comments with anecdata about no one using FF at their companies because of performance issues. A lot of people have issues, some don't - doesn't make the ones that do have them complete imbeciles.
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    It's definitely frustrating, and sometimes even advanced devs don't know (or forget) about some detail that might be helpful. Sometimes "why someone hasn't tried that" is less about being clueless and more about not assuming how much people know about things. I can imagine someone at Mozilla going "how do we debug this" and failing to reproduce the problem (I run FF on two different Macs/OSX versions and it runs ok on both) Maybe FF can add some telemetry or have a special debug version for those with the issue, but I see how it can be frustrating
wishinghand 8y ago
Electron apps like Slack and VS Code tend to eat up my RAM capacity and CPU cycles. Whenever I quote everything except for Firefox my MacBook Pro calms its fans down.
rusk 8y ago
just to confirm, did you get the "Developer Edition"? I've been using it on Mac (2014 MBP w/ Retina) for a while and it's fine. That said, I haven't been using it as my main browser ... yet.
hellofunk 8y ago
I’ve had the same problem for years, a few months ago someone suggested it might be because I don’t use my screen at the default resolution. I have a slightly lower resolution setting on my retina MacBook Pro. And that somehow this causes firefox to go insane and have a nervous breakdown. Is it possible that you are also not using the default display resolution? If everyone who has the problems shares this particular setting, that might point to something.
konart 8y ago
> Why hasn't "the bug" As a frequent /r/firefox visitor - while I do agree that Fx team should spend more time investigating this, I still have to note that this is not a bug or something ssimilar that can be easily reproduced. I have late 2013 MPBr and 2014 iMac and never had any issues of a sort ever since quantum release. The only problem (performance wise) were videos on Youtube, but it seems to be fixed already. So it is there for some people and it is not for the others. With dfferent Macbooks\software\setups etc.
rerx 8y ago
Late 2016 15 inch Macbook Pro, LG 5k screen with the scaling set one tick into the "more space" direction. With Firefox performance is still significantly worse than with Chrome. This is a real bummer, I really miss tree style tabs.
gog 8y ago
I had this same issue on my late 2013 Macbook Pro Retina, but it didn't stop me from using it :) Since I switched to 2018 Macbook Pro Retina the issue is gone.
sarreph 8y ago
Is it at least a couple of years old with a GPU? There have been serious electron bugs since last year in these machines.
fetbaffe 8y ago
Just a few weeks ago I tried Firefox as my main browser for a while. I had to give it up because of battery life. This is on Windows 10. Edge preserves my battery the best, however Edge is not practical to use, so Opera with the battery saving option is currently the best bet. Firefox is still my main development browser though.
Manishearth 8y ago
IIRC this bug is known (something about compositing and rounded corners on Mac because of how Core Graphics works) and there's work going on to fix it. The Webrender stuff helps here too, I think. (I don't know the exact details, I have a vague recollection of pcwalton explaining it to me)
Manishearth 8y ago
Does setting gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true in about:config fix the problem?
Yoric 8y ago
I know about ~100 Firefox developers with Macbooks and none of them experiences the issue, so that's probably harder to reproduce. Would you be interested in help to profile the issue and file a detailed bug? This would help fix it.
- kossTKR 8y ago
  Off course. I would really like to ditch Chrome once and for all. What i don't get is that it's an unknown problem, many people have already filed bug reports on the tracker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626325 (also see several blog posts like: https://www.kamshin.com/2018/07/firefox-on-macos-insane-battery-drain-subpar-performance-and-endless-frustration/ https://www.kamshin.com/2018/07/firefox-on-macos-insane-batt...) I think it has to do with running the Macbook Pro at scaled resolution which is pretty much standard among devs on MB pro no? (otherwise you will have very little screen real estate). I just created i Profile through the Gecko profiler once again but i don't know if that captures the CPU data? What external profiler do you use? Profile here from Firefox nightly, 1 minute of scrolling around https://fs8.transfernow.net/download/5c0a9b99f98e/master/Firefox%202018-12-07%2016.43%20profile.sps.json.gz https://fs8.transfernow.net/download/5c0a9b99f98e/master/Fir... ---- Very non scientific test below that i need to external profiler to confirm: Symptoms: I get a hot computer when browsing / working normally high CPU usage leading to fans constantly running and battery drain Doesn't happen in other browsers Comparative methodology: Open 20 tabs and scroll a bit up and down for 1 minute. Check CPU usage in Activity monitor. Check fan speed an temp. Repeat in all major browsers. Result: Safari, Chrome and Opera the fans stays silent and i get moderate CPU usage. Firefox the fans kick in quickly (also ran first to have a fair baseline temperature).
  - Yoric 8y ago
    Ah, thanks for the links, very useful. Do I understand correctly that you're checking CPU usage immediately after having scrolled up/down, or while scrolling up/down, right? Apparently, there are already people working on that bug. If I understand things correctly, Firefox uses transparent windows, but transparent windows use lots of CPU on some macOS configurations, and this somehow wasn't detected during testing (I imagine that the computers used for testing didn't have these configurations). If this is the same bug, as is likely, the bug is identified and developers are working on it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522 . If you wish, you may leave a message on that bug mentioning that you are available for profiling and testing a fix. It is my impression (but don't take my word on it) that the fix will ship in Firefox 65, which is currently in Nightly. Now, I'm not sure that the fix has already landed in the current Nightlies, but do you have the possibility of testing on Firefox Nightly if the problem is still present? (usual caveat: Nightly has Telemetry activated by default – if you don't like Telemetry, don't forget to disable it)

inferiorhuman 8y ago

I use the nightly builds and I definitely do not have that problem with around 750 tabs open on my non-retina MacBook Pro. It does suck down memory though.

kossTKR 8y ago
Which doesn't change anything since the Macbook Pro has been sold with Retina displays for what, the last 6 years? The fact that Firefox works exclusively on ancient laptops or edge cases doesn't make anything better. All Apple devices today are sold with Retina screens and the Pro Lineup, and therefore most devs has had Retina screens for 6+ years.
- inferiorhuman 8y ago
  Sure, it's a mid-2012 MBP with the "high res" matte screen. A six year old machine is hardly an edge case in the context of a problem you've been seeing for at least five years. I've not had problems with FF performance on the handful of retina machines I've used for work either. If the Mozilla devs aren't paying attention to and haven't remedied the problem you're experiencing, perhaps you're the edge case?
  - kossTKR 8y ago
    What? I just wrote that their support subreddit is filled with posts about performance on OSX, this thread in itself already has loads of posts with people complaining about it, and my post just is getting lots of upvotes - how is that an edge case? Also all Firefox threads on Hackernews has these posts, every single one. As i said before i have been following this for years. You having a 2012 computer is 100% the edge case - not that there is anything wrong in that, i love keeping tech for as long as possible.
    - 1996 8y ago
      There is no excuse for firefox bad performance on decent hard. And such "old" computers are not edge cases! Any Sandy Bridge i7 from 2012 easily outperforms most odern laptops. There is some progress made in performance per watt, but raw performance strongly decrease after the 39xx series.
    - inferiorhuman 8y ago
      > You having a 2012 computer is 100% the edge case How so? It's the same processor (Ivy Bridge) and GPU combo (HD 4000 + GT 650M) as the first few revisions of the retina MBP models. The big difference is the display resolution (1680x1050 vs 2880x1800). You're saying this problem goes back five years (2013). Whether or not the 2012 model is particularly common now, the guts were common in 2013 back when you claim to have seen the problem. I've got a newer (still non-retina) iMac and have used a variety of retina machines for work and haven't seen any performance problems with FF either. Sure, if I run a bunch of flash based video players I can get the fans to go nuts but that's not a FF problem (the same thing happens if I use Chrome, flash is just an inefficient means of rendering video). If the Mozilla devs haven't reproduced your complaint on a first class platform it's a pretty safe bet that you're doing something whacky whether or not you realize it.

nindalf 8y ago

FWIW I’ve used it on a low spec MacBook Pro for a year and a half without a problem. Never had any complaints, and it’s only gotten better after the Quantum changes.

1ris 8y ago

I have no idea what you people are doing. I use FF with my mid spec, 4th generation i5 with 500+ tabs and haven't experienced any of your problems.

stdclass 8y ago
I had the exact same experience as the grand parent comment. Seriously wanted to switch to Firefox after the browser-sign-in "feature" but the performance on my high-end 2018 macbook pro with 16gb ram was just abysmal (20 tabs open tops).
- hellofunk 8y ago
  Do you use your Mac with the default screen resolution setting, or have you tweaked that setting?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - stdclass 8y ago
    I also use the "more space" setting. Haven't tried it with the normal scaling though.
    - hellofunk 8y ago
      In my case I am actually going in the other direction, towards the "larger text" scaling.
kossTKR 8y ago
I think there should be some kind of survey. Every thread on HN has these posts complaining about this problem, and every thread has people like you insinuating we are doing something "whacky" or "crazy" with our laptops. To me it seems that a large segment of users using the Retina screens (most people on the osx platform) has severe performance problems. Some people have no problems. And that is just the state of affairs. The weird thing for me is that there is no official "issue" or information about the problems since so many experience it.

nishanmiranda 8y ago

I have been using Firefox on my Macbook Pro 2015 for the past years without any problems and seriously it consumes a lot less memory compared with chrome

daxhuiberts 8y ago

I have the exact same issue. I'm using a fully specced MacBook Pro early 2015 with a Retina screen in a scaled mode (1.5x) and Firefox is extremely slow to use. Scrolling isn't fluid at all and CPU usage is very high. When I put it in the normal Retina mode (2x) it's much better, but still not as fluid as using Chrome, which even on 1.5x mode works and scrolls fluidly. I'm also using Firefox on an underpowered Ubuntu machine and it works wonderfully there though (no HiDPI screen).

cheeze 8y ago

Firefox has never been good on Mac. It kills me :(

raverbashing 8y ago

Interesting. Works fine here 1st step to trying to debug would be removing your old profile completely, maybe try to disable extensions and HW rendering acceleration

kossTKR 8y ago
Thanks but check out the other comments, or their subreddit, or any other HN FF thread. Many people have this problem. Also i am a dev - i have tried all possible options to remedy this issue. I even wrote that i talked to FF devs directly. Wouldn't it be weird if i hadn't tried basic techniques? It's like there is this weird tribal thing going on where there is this passive aggressive attitude towards the people having problems like "you guys must be idiots" even though there is dozens of comments with anecdata about no one using FF at their companies because of performance issues. A lot of people have issues, some don't - doesn't make the ones that do have them complete imbeciles.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  It's definitely frustrating, and sometimes even advanced devs don't know (or forget) about some detail that might be helpful. Sometimes "why someone hasn't tried that" is less about being clueless and more about not assuming how much people know about things. I can imagine someone at Mozilla going "how do we debug this" and failing to reproduce the problem (I run FF on two different Macs/OSX versions and it runs ok on both) Maybe FF can add some telemetry or have a special debug version for those with the issue, but I see how it can be frustrating

wishinghand 8y ago

Electron apps like Slack and VS Code tend to eat up my RAM capacity and CPU cycles. Whenever I quote everything except for Firefox my MacBook Pro calms its fans down.

rusk 8y ago

just to confirm, did you get the "Developer Edition"? I've been using it on Mac (2014 MBP w/ Retina) for a while and it's fine. That said, I haven't been using it as my main browser ... yet.

hellofunk 8y ago

I’ve had the same problem for years, a few months ago someone suggested it might be because I don’t use my screen at the default resolution. I have a slightly lower resolution setting on my retina MacBook Pro. And that somehow this causes firefox to go insane and have a nervous breakdown. Is it possible that you are also not using the default display resolution? If everyone who has the problems shares this particular setting, that might point to something.

konart 8y ago

> Why hasn't "the bug" As a frequent /r/firefox visitor - while I do agree that Fx team should spend more time investigating this, I still have to note that this is not a bug or something ssimilar that can be easily reproduced. I have late 2013 MPBr and 2014 iMac and never had any issues of a sort ever since quantum release. The only problem (performance wise) were videos on Youtube, but it seems to be fixed already. So it is there for some people and it is not for the others. With dfferent Macbooks\software\setups etc.

rerx 8y ago

Late 2016 15 inch Macbook Pro, LG 5k screen with the scaling set one tick into the "more space" direction. With Firefox performance is still significantly worse than with Chrome. This is a real bummer, I really miss tree style tabs.

gog 8y ago

I had this same issue on my late 2013 Macbook Pro Retina, but it didn't stop me from using it :) Since I switched to 2018 Macbook Pro Retina the issue is gone.

sarreph 8y ago

Is it at least a couple of years old with a GPU? There have been serious electron bugs since last year in these machines.

fetbaffe 8y ago

Just a few weeks ago I tried Firefox as my main browser for a while. I had to give it up because of battery life. This is on Windows 10. Edge preserves my battery the best, however Edge is not practical to use, so Opera with the battery saving option is currently the best bet. Firefox is still my main development browser though.

Manishearth 8y ago

IIRC this bug is known (something about compositing and rounded corners on Mac because of how Core Graphics works) and there's work going on to fix it. The Webrender stuff helps here too, I think. (I don't know the exact details, I have a vague recollection of pcwalton explaining it to me)

Manishearth 8y ago

Does setting gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true in about:config fix the problem?

Yoric 8y ago

I know about ~100 Firefox developers with Macbooks and none of them experiences the issue, so that's probably harder to reproduce. Would you be interested in help to profile the issue and file a detailed bug? This would help fix it.

kossTKR 8y ago
Off course. I would really like to ditch Chrome once and for all. What i don't get is that it's an unknown problem, many people have already filed bug reports on the tracker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18626325 (also see several blog posts like: https://www.kamshin.com/2018/07/firefox-on-macos-insane-battery-drain-subpar-performance-and-endless-frustration/ https://www.kamshin.com/2018/07/firefox-on-macos-insane-batt...) I think it has to do with running the Macbook Pro at scaled resolution which is pretty much standard among devs on MB pro no? (otherwise you will have very little screen real estate). I just created i Profile through the Gecko profiler once again but i don't know if that captures the CPU data? What external profiler do you use? Profile here from Firefox nightly, 1 minute of scrolling around https://fs8.transfernow.net/download/5c0a9b99f98e/master/Firefox%202018-12-07%2016.43%20profile.sps.json.gz https://fs8.transfernow.net/download/5c0a9b99f98e/master/Fir... ---- Very non scientific test below that i need to external profiler to confirm: Symptoms: I get a hot computer when browsing / working normally high CPU usage leading to fans constantly running and battery drain Doesn't happen in other browsers Comparative methodology: Open 20 tabs and scroll a bit up and down for 1 minute. Check CPU usage in Activity monitor. Check fan speed an temp. Repeat in all major browsers. Result: Safari, Chrome and Opera the fans stays silent and i get moderate CPU usage. Firefox the fans kick in quickly (also ran first to have a fair baseline temperature).
- Yoric 8y ago
  Ah, thanks for the links, very useful. Do I understand correctly that you're checking CPU usage immediately after having scrolled up/down, or while scrolling up/down, right? Apparently, there are already people working on that bug. If I understand things correctly, Firefox uses transparent windows, but transparent windows use lots of CPU on some macOS configurations, and this somehow wasn't detected during testing (I imagine that the computers used for testing didn't have these configurations). If this is the same bug, as is likely, the bug is identified and developers are working on it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522 . If you wish, you may leave a message on that bug mentioning that you are available for profiling and testing a fix. It is my impression (but don't take my word on it) that the fix will ship in Firefox 65, which is currently in Nightly. Now, I'm not sure that the fix has already landed in the current Nightlies, but do you have the possibility of testing on Firefox Nightly if the problem is still present? (usual caveat: Nightly has Telemetry activated by default – if you don't like Telemetry, don't forget to disable it)