3 ms·

From the last 3 or so versions Firefox performance on my retina mac is indistinguishable from chrome (from a humam perspective not looking at ram cpu usage), so

From the last 3 or so versions Firefox performance on my retina mac is indistinguishable from chrome (from a humam perspective not looking at ram cpu usage), so I'm very happy to be using firefox full time once again. At some point I knew it was time to close firefox when the fans started blowing at max speed. Does not happen any more.

Sharlin 8y ago
> At some point I knew it was time to close firefox when the fans started blowing at max speed. In my experience on Mac the guilty party has consistently been the plugin container (or rather something inside it, presumably a bad video codec). `killall plugin-container` fixes the problem without having to restart Firefox, but unfortunately also crashes many if not most tabs (appears everything wants to use a multimedia plugin or another these days...)
- bzbarsky 8y ago
  The "plugin-container" executable is used for all sandboxed processes on Windows. That started out as plug-ins, but now includes web renderers. So the "something inside it" could be script on a web page, or part of Gecko's rendering pipeline, or pretty much anything. And killig it crashes tabs because it's the thing rendering those tabs. It might make sense to rename the executable to make things clearer, but there are some problems: there is Windows software that hardcodes the executable name and does things based on it, and changing the name would break various things for users.... On Mac and Linux, where this problem doesn't exist, the process naming is much saner...
  - Sharlin 8y ago
    Oh, my experience was on Mac like the GP’s. Edited to clarify. On Windows or Linux I haven’t encountered a similar 100% CPU use problem, which has led me to suspect it’s specifically the Mac version of some plugin that’s the problem.
    - bzbarsky 8y ago
      Interesting. On Mac, the process is called "plugin-container" if you use something like "ps", but Activity Monitor shows it as "FirefoxCP Web Content", which is a lot clearer...
  - dblohm7 8y ago
    Actually we only use plugin-container for NPAPI on Windows. I believe that MacOS was specifically the platform where we ran into problems.
    - bzbarsky 8y ago
      Thank you for the correction!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Jonanin 8y ago
One thing I love about firefox performance-wise is that closing tabs is instant. I can close a lot of tabs very quickly. Chrome lags quite a bit on tab close.
- kkarakk 8y ago
  why would you ever close tabs?
  - 0-_-0 8y ago
    Don't worry, I got your joke.
chapium 8y ago
Firefox is very slow on 2014 macs and causes fans to spin up to mad speed. This tends to happen with html5 video players. Chrome seems to not have this issue.
crawrey 8y ago
Performance has improved considerably. However, there is still a major outstanding bug, due to the rendering of window transparency[1]. Window transparency can be turned off by setting "gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque" to true in about:config. This will cause a minor degradation in appearance of the window frame and tabs, but it will improve performance and extend battery life. I have had it set for over 6 months and am anticipating the resolution of this outstanding bug. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522

Sharlin 8y ago

> At some point I knew it was time to close firefox when the fans started blowing at max speed. In my experience on Mac the guilty party has consistently been the plugin container (or rather something inside it, presumably a bad video codec). `killall plugin-container` fixes the problem without having to restart Firefox, but unfortunately also crashes many if not most tabs (appears everything wants to use a multimedia plugin or another these days...)

bzbarsky 8y ago
The "plugin-container" executable is used for all sandboxed processes on Windows. That started out as plug-ins, but now includes web renderers. So the "something inside it" could be script on a web page, or part of Gecko's rendering pipeline, or pretty much anything. And killig it crashes tabs because it's the thing rendering those tabs. It might make sense to rename the executable to make things clearer, but there are some problems: there is Windows software that hardcodes the executable name and does things based on it, and changing the name would break various things for users.... On Mac and Linux, where this problem doesn't exist, the process naming is much saner...
- Sharlin 8y ago
  Oh, my experience was on Mac like the GP’s. Edited to clarify. On Windows or Linux I haven’t encountered a similar 100% CPU use problem, which has led me to suspect it’s specifically the Mac version of some plugin that’s the problem.
  - bzbarsky 8y ago
    Interesting. On Mac, the process is called "plugin-container" if you use something like "ps", but Activity Monitor shows it as "FirefoxCP Web Content", which is a lot clearer...
- dblohm7 8y ago
  Actually we only use plugin-container for NPAPI on Windows. I believe that MacOS was specifically the platform where we ran into problems.
  - bzbarsky 8y ago
    Thank you for the correction!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

Jonanin 8y ago

One thing I love about firefox performance-wise is that closing tabs is instant. I can close a lot of tabs very quickly. Chrome lags quite a bit on tab close.

kkarakk 8y ago
why would you ever close tabs?
- 0-_-0 8y ago
  Don't worry, I got your joke.

chapium 8y ago

Firefox is very slow on 2014 macs and causes fans to spin up to mad speed. This tends to happen with html5 video players. Chrome seems to not have this issue.

crawrey 8y ago

Performance has improved considerably. However, there is still a major outstanding bug, due to the rendering of window transparency[1]. Window transparency can be turned off by setting "gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque" to true in about:config. This will cause a minor degradation in appearance of the window frame and tabs, but it will improve performance and extend battery life. I have had it set for over 6 months and am anticipating the resolution of this outstanding bug. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522