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I've been trying to switch over to Firefox for the last few weeks. The experience hasn't been great, but most of the issues I'm willing to live with. However, e

I've been trying to switch over to Firefox for the last few weeks. The experience hasn't been great, but most of the issues I'm willing to live with. However, even after disabling all extensions, it still pegs my cpus and freezes my machine, several times a day. I'm planning on moving back to chrome this weekend. No amount of privacy can make up for the disruption.

barrkel 7y ago
This is not normal behaviour. I've never had Firefox do that, even with a whole bunch of extensions, on Windows, Linux or Mac, over the past 10+ years. It did used to run out of memory for images, and the UI of Firefox (and just Firefox) would sometimes pause, but those issues are a couple of years back now. I'd dig deeper. There's something odd in your machine configuration.
- sinsterizme 7y ago
  This is simply not true. It seems like a common problem. Chrome just seems more optimized and works flawlessly on a wider range of devices. Waving away individual issues is not the right solution
  - pojzon 7y ago
    A quick search on google search history trends show this statement: "It seems like a common problem" is "simply not true". Searching for firefox and freeze decreased significantly over the years. In current iteration I would say it's way more probable that the person who started this chain has an overall issue with PC performance outside of firefox. 1. https://trends.google.pl/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=Firefox%20freeze https://trends.google.pl/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=F...
  - joedevon 7y ago
    I have a lot more problems with Chrome than Firefox in the last year or two. FWIW.
  - AsyncAwait 7y ago
    > Chrome just seems more optimized and works flawlessly Not in my experience, Chrome on Linux sometimes freezes even while switching tabs for a sec or two, while Firefox is super smooth.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
sebazzz 7y ago
Assuming you didn't start clean, try starting with a new profile. If you did, try updating your GPU drivers. You also may want to try the Developer Edition which may contain some improvements.
feelandcoffee 7y ago
Do you run mac OS? Because I had this same issue with a macbook, when jump to Windows and Linux, the CPU keep the same as Chrome, but in mac Firefox was slow, and make the fans be at top speed.
- WalterSear 7y ago
  Yup. Macbook Air 6.1, Mojave. 8 gigs ram. Plenty (30+gigs) free SSD disk space.
  - sfink 7y ago
    Sounds like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 . The bug is old and has a huge number of comments; maybe just start with comment 199.
babuskov 7y ago
I have seen similar problems right after using GMail or watching YouTube videos. Firefox would keep CPU busy even if I closed those tabs. I stopped watching YouTube on Firefox because of this. This is on macOS.
- WalterSear 7y ago
  Me too.
- dralley 7y ago
  > YouTube and Gmail There's a common element here and I'm trying to put my finger on it. It rhymes with Scroogle. Why is it that the only websites I have issues with (Firefox user) are Google properties?
  - babuskov 7y ago
    To be honest, I'm not using that many websites. Maybe 20-30 in total. It is possible that other sites have similar problems, but I noticed with Gmail and YouTube because I use those two a lot. Or maybe, unlike the rest of the sites, Google engineers don't bother to test stuff on Firefox?
  - WalterSear 7y ago
    Gmail is definitely a problem site for me, but it's not just google sites.
  - Scrantonicity 7y ago
    I also started seeing much slower performance in Google Maps and street view in the last few weeks.
  - boybd 7y ago
    If you close the tabs and Firefox keeps using CPU, how's that Google's fault? Or are you suggesting that Google is exploiting some bug in Firefox to have it use CPU time even when the tab is closed?
michaelmrose 7y ago
Sounds like buggy behavior. The logical conclusion is that the devs aren't rebooting their computer 7 times a day so your experience differs from theirs. Perhaps they could benefit from a bug report.
- WalterSear 7y ago
  If I was running a beta, I'd happily do that. But I have little goodwill left at this point and little expectation of being rewarded for investing any more time, or interesting waiting for a fix. There's a plethora of 'how to stop Firefox from being a cpu hog' articles online, which suggests that this isn't uncommon behaviour, nor limited to a recent release.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    Complaining on hacker news doesn't get stuff fixed bug reports preferably with specific info like specific software/hardware versions and sites on which the behavior occur do. In all likelihood - 10% of laptops/desktops are mac - 5-10% or less run firefox on mac. If firefox has more problems on mac I wouldn't be surprised if firefox had less marketshare on mac than overall. -Some unknown percentage have major issues, lets call it 1% since lots of people report firefox works fine for them on mac. You could be facing issues faced by only 0.05%-0.5% of firefox users. If people who face such issues overwhelmingly choose not to bother to report them then they will never be corrected. Beta testing is unlikely to ever find all possible issues that will be uncovered when a product is exposed to millions of users. Obvious bugs that effect everyone are quickly fixed. What's left is often less obvious issues that effect a smaller portion of the user base.
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      I use Firefox daily on a Mac. It just works. Since Quantum or so, it works fast. Before that, I resorted to Chrome on Mac. And because of that, I resorted to Chrome in general. At work, in the virtual desktop (which I can actually avoid using most of the time) I only get to choose between IE or Chrome. My point? You lost me as a Firefox user in the past. And I have been an avid Netscape Navigator, Netscape Communicator, Mozilla SeaMonkey (first milestones) and Mozilla Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox user in the past (I even used Phoenix 0.1). The only other browser which I used with pleasure, is Opera (with Presto). It's not just that. I don't want a homogeneous browser culture. I believe that is bad on the long term.
kup0 7y ago
I get full OS freezes periodically and it's the only thing keeping me from switching, really. It usually unfreezes after anywhere between 10-60 seconds. But mouse won't move or anything during the freeze. It's on Windows 10, Nvidia GPU. Have tried the bucket list of things to solve this without any solution so far. It happens even with just two or three tabs open. I believe it boils down to this unsolved bug, at least in my situation. I do need to profile it myself if I want to know for sure though: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1501281 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1501281 It only happens with Firefox, nothing else. All other games, programs, browsers, etc run without issue. Firefox is the only commonality that causes the freezes. If there are no Firefox processes open, the freeze does not occur. Oddly, I see you're on macOS, where I also used Firefox- but I never had an issue there. Interesting, because it seems my experience is the reverse of that of most Firefox users.
- dblohm7 7y ago
  Do you need accessibility services? If not, I would suggest that you disable it in about:preferences.
  - kup0 7y ago
    Interesting. Is it known to cause this issue- have any more info on it? I don't use it so I will disable
    - dblohm7 7y ago
      I am the developer who ported Gecko a11y to multiprocess on Windows. Some third-party software unnecessarily tries to use the Windows a11y API to do stuff with other programs, but in Firefox that may incur a performance penalty depending on what the third-party code is doing.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Not to be all "me too", but yeah, I've had a lot of problems with Firefox like this. It stops responding or the entire desktop stops responding. The only systems I use Firefox on are Lubuntu laptops I use for monitoring my Twitch dashboard when I stream, so it isn't like I'm browsing esoteric sites with strange and complicated workloads or something.
robbrown451 7y ago
I have similar complaints with Firefox. It doesn't freeze my machine to the point of rebooting, but a whole lot of seeing MacOS's "rainbow beachball." Overall it is just a clunky experience. And I can't run stuff I'm working on because they don't support communication with MIDI devices (they've been talking about it for years) I think a better solution for many of us is an un-Googled version of Chrome/Blink, such as Brave or maybe even Edge when it is ready. You CAN get the best of Chrome without the worst, and the more Google does these things, the more effort people will go to to make it easier to do so.
- asark 7y ago
  > It doesn't freeze my machine to the point of rebooting, but a whole lot of seeing MacOS's "rainbow beachball." Yikes, still? That exact thing happening way too often—with like a half-dozen very normal tabs open, and when FF wasn't even in focus—was what drove me first to Chrome (where I could open a stupid number of heavy tabs and not see problems as bad as FF), then later to Safari (for the double-digit-percentage better battery life than Chrome) on my Macbooks, and that was... wow, probably 2010 or so.
  - acdha 7y ago
    It’s not normal — usually it’s caused by buggy extensions but even that improved when they dropped the legacy extension interface due to problems like that.
ilaksh 7y ago
I also switched to Firefox recently on Windows 10. It can be quite slow compared to Chrome. But a freeze is very rare for me.
xeonoex 7y ago
I see this kinda of post on every post about Firefox here and it's so weird because I use Firefox on every device and have never had any issues. Even on sites like youtube.
- onyva 7y ago
  It’ll be interesting to find out how it works these fake news piece about Firefox that’s always there. I switched to Firefox few years back and if there’s something very noticeable about it currently (other than slickness) it’s how performant it has become, even with 10s of tabs open.
- dr_zoidberg 7y ago
  I've had a lot of unstable behaviour on Firefox, ironically, from the stable branch. Moving to the beta channel a couple of years ago solved most of my issues. And I've absolutely loved the Quantum upgrades so far, even though some seemed a bit iffy at first[0, 1]. [0] the roadmap to get GPU support on WebRender for example -- but I guess in time we'll see how that turns out. [1] one which I had a few issues was the multiprocess approach. That brought me some trouble at first but in the end got ironed out just fine.
- ehsankia 7y ago
  Anyone who's worked in the video game industry knows how insanely inconsistent compatibility can be on across different device configurations. With browsers using more and more GPU acceleration, it wouldn't surprising if some configurations have major performance bugs. The one thing with Chrome is that it has very good compatibility.
- jay_kyburz 7y ago
  Its also weird that nobody mentions what OS they are running. Firefox on Mac is really different than Firefox on windows.
jancsika 7y ago
That's really interesting because I've had the exact opposite experience. I switched from Firefox to Chromium after some problems I ran into on a laptop. The experience wasn't great, but I was willing to live with most of the issues. However, even after disabling all extensions, it still pegged my cpus and froze my machine, several times a day. I moved back to Firefox. No amount of features was going to make up for that disruption.
crispinb 7y ago
Similar to my experience. First on MacOS, then when I switched to dual-boot Win/Linux in 2018, I found it to be the same on all three platforms. I don't get extreme CPU & machine freeze often, but FF itself frequently (2 or 3 times a day) stops responding & I have to kill it. Shame, as there are things I really like about it (notably multi-account containers). But it just doesn't work well enough for me.
savingGrace 7y ago
Every now and then I see one of these articles that talks of the evils of Google. It makes me give Firefox a go again. Every single time I go back to Chrome. I've had 5 different computers and FF always freezes at some point on every one of them. I'm a front-end dev and having all of my working tabs go away is not great. Secondly, this last FF freeze (a couple days ago) blew up my profile. Google may not care about my privacy, but there are no alternatives.
- amelius 7y ago
  You could at least use Chromium instead of Chrome.
  - hollerith 7y ago
    If I use Chromium, how would I get security updates in time? If there is no good answer to that, then how would I get warned of a vulnerability so that I can switch temporarily to Chrome till the vulnerability is fixed in Chromium?
- acdha 7y ago
  Have you tried starting with a clean profile and no extensions? It’s been many years since crashes have been common on Windows or MacOS – generally since they moved Flash into a separate process.

barrkel 7y ago

This is not normal behaviour. I've never had Firefox do that, even with a whole bunch of extensions, on Windows, Linux or Mac, over the past 10+ years. It did used to run out of memory for images, and the UI of Firefox (and just Firefox) would sometimes pause, but those issues are a couple of years back now. I'd dig deeper. There's something odd in your machine configuration.

sinsterizme 7y ago
This is simply not true. It seems like a common problem. Chrome just seems more optimized and works flawlessly on a wider range of devices. Waving away individual issues is not the right solution
- pojzon 7y ago
  A quick search on google search history trends show this statement: "It seems like a common problem" is "simply not true". Searching for firefox and freeze decreased significantly over the years. In current iteration I would say it's way more probable that the person who started this chain has an overall issue with PC performance outside of firefox. 1. https://trends.google.pl/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=Firefox%20freeze https://trends.google.pl/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=F...
- joedevon 7y ago
  I have a lot more problems with Chrome than Firefox in the last year or two. FWIW.
- AsyncAwait 7y ago
  > Chrome just seems more optimized and works flawlessly Not in my experience, Chrome on Linux sometimes freezes even while switching tabs for a sec or two, while Firefox is super smooth.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

sebazzz 7y ago

Assuming you didn't start clean, try starting with a new profile. If you did, try updating your GPU drivers. You also may want to try the Developer Edition which may contain some improvements.

feelandcoffee 7y ago

Do you run mac OS? Because I had this same issue with a macbook, when jump to Windows and Linux, the CPU keep the same as Chrome, but in mac Firefox was slow, and make the fans be at top speed.

WalterSear 7y ago
Yup. Macbook Air 6.1, Mojave. 8 gigs ram. Plenty (30+gigs) free SSD disk space.
- sfink 7y ago
  Sounds like https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 . The bug is old and has a huge number of comments; maybe just start with comment 199.

babuskov 7y ago

I have seen similar problems right after using GMail or watching YouTube videos. Firefox would keep CPU busy even if I closed those tabs. I stopped watching YouTube on Firefox because of this. This is on macOS.

WalterSear 7y ago
Me too.
dralley 7y ago
> YouTube and Gmail There's a common element here and I'm trying to put my finger on it. It rhymes with Scroogle. Why is it that the only websites I have issues with (Firefox user) are Google properties?
- babuskov 7y ago
  To be honest, I'm not using that many websites. Maybe 20-30 in total. It is possible that other sites have similar problems, but I noticed with Gmail and YouTube because I use those two a lot. Or maybe, unlike the rest of the sites, Google engineers don't bother to test stuff on Firefox?
- WalterSear 7y ago
  Gmail is definitely a problem site for me, but it's not just google sites.
- Scrantonicity 7y ago
  I also started seeing much slower performance in Google Maps and street view in the last few weeks.
- boybd 7y ago
  If you close the tabs and Firefox keeps using CPU, how's that Google's fault? Or are you suggesting that Google is exploiting some bug in Firefox to have it use CPU time even when the tab is closed?

michaelmrose 7y ago

Sounds like buggy behavior. The logical conclusion is that the devs aren't rebooting their computer 7 times a day so your experience differs from theirs. Perhaps they could benefit from a bug report.

WalterSear 7y ago
If I was running a beta, I'd happily do that. But I have little goodwill left at this point and little expectation of being rewarded for investing any more time, or interesting waiting for a fix. There's a plethora of 'how to stop Firefox from being a cpu hog' articles online, which suggests that this isn't uncommon behaviour, nor limited to a recent release.
- michaelmrose 7y ago
  Complaining on hacker news doesn't get stuff fixed bug reports preferably with specific info like specific software/hardware versions and sites on which the behavior occur do. In all likelihood - 10% of laptops/desktops are mac - 5-10% or less run firefox on mac. If firefox has more problems on mac I wouldn't be surprised if firefox had less marketshare on mac than overall. -Some unknown percentage have major issues, lets call it 1% since lots of people report firefox works fine for them on mac. You could be facing issues faced by only 0.05%-0.5% of firefox users. If people who face such issues overwhelmingly choose not to bother to report them then they will never be corrected. Beta testing is unlikely to ever find all possible issues that will be uncovered when a product is exposed to millions of users. Obvious bugs that effect everyone are quickly fixed. What's left is often less obvious issues that effect a smaller portion of the user base.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    I use Firefox daily on a Mac. It just works. Since Quantum or so, it works fast. Before that, I resorted to Chrome on Mac. And because of that, I resorted to Chrome in general. At work, in the virtual desktop (which I can actually avoid using most of the time) I only get to choose between IE or Chrome. My point? You lost me as a Firefox user in the past. And I have been an avid Netscape Navigator, Netscape Communicator, Mozilla SeaMonkey (first milestones) and Mozilla Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox user in the past (I even used Phoenix 0.1). The only other browser which I used with pleasure, is Opera (with Presto). It's not just that. I don't want a homogeneous browser culture. I believe that is bad on the long term.

kup0 7y ago

I get full OS freezes periodically and it's the only thing keeping me from switching, really. It usually unfreezes after anywhere between 10-60 seconds. But mouse won't move or anything during the freeze. It's on Windows 10, Nvidia GPU. Have tried the bucket list of things to solve this without any solution so far. It happens even with just two or three tabs open. I believe it boils down to this unsolved bug, at least in my situation. I do need to profile it myself if I want to know for sure though: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1501281 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1501281 It only happens with Firefox, nothing else. All other games, programs, browsers, etc run without issue. Firefox is the only commonality that causes the freezes. If there are no Firefox processes open, the freeze does not occur. Oddly, I see you're on macOS, where I also used Firefox- but I never had an issue there. Interesting, because it seems my experience is the reverse of that of most Firefox users.

dblohm7 7y ago
Do you need accessibility services? If not, I would suggest that you disable it in about:preferences.
- kup0 7y ago
  Interesting. Is it known to cause this issue- have any more info on it? I don't use it so I will disable
  - dblohm7 7y ago
    I am the developer who ported Gecko a11y to multiprocess on Windows. Some third-party software unnecessarily tries to use the Windows a11y API to do stuff with other programs, but in Firefox that may incur a performance penalty depending on what the third-party code is doing.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

Not to be all "me too", but yeah, I've had a lot of problems with Firefox like this. It stops responding or the entire desktop stops responding. The only systems I use Firefox on are Lubuntu laptops I use for monitoring my Twitch dashboard when I stream, so it isn't like I'm browsing esoteric sites with strange and complicated workloads or something.

robbrown451 7y ago

I have similar complaints with Firefox. It doesn't freeze my machine to the point of rebooting, but a whole lot of seeing MacOS's "rainbow beachball." Overall it is just a clunky experience. And I can't run stuff I'm working on because they don't support communication with MIDI devices (they've been talking about it for years) I think a better solution for many of us is an un-Googled version of Chrome/Blink, such as Brave or maybe even Edge when it is ready. You CAN get the best of Chrome without the worst, and the more Google does these things, the more effort people will go to to make it easier to do so.

asark 7y ago
> It doesn't freeze my machine to the point of rebooting, but a whole lot of seeing MacOS's "rainbow beachball." Yikes, still? That exact thing happening way too often—with like a half-dozen very normal tabs open, and when FF wasn't even in focus—was what drove me first to Chrome (where I could open a stupid number of heavy tabs and not see problems as bad as FF), then later to Safari (for the double-digit-percentage better battery life than Chrome) on my Macbooks, and that was... wow, probably 2010 or so.
- acdha 7y ago
  It’s not normal — usually it’s caused by buggy extensions but even that improved when they dropped the legacy extension interface due to problems like that.

ilaksh 7y ago

I also switched to Firefox recently on Windows 10. It can be quite slow compared to Chrome. But a freeze is very rare for me.

xeonoex 7y ago

I see this kinda of post on every post about Firefox here and it's so weird because I use Firefox on every device and have never had any issues. Even on sites like youtube.

onyva 7y ago
It’ll be interesting to find out how it works these fake news piece about Firefox that’s always there. I switched to Firefox few years back and if there’s something very noticeable about it currently (other than slickness) it’s how performant it has become, even with 10s of tabs open.
dr_zoidberg 7y ago
I've had a lot of unstable behaviour on Firefox, ironically, from the stable branch. Moving to the beta channel a couple of years ago solved most of my issues. And I've absolutely loved the Quantum upgrades so far, even though some seemed a bit iffy at first[0, 1]. [0] the roadmap to get GPU support on WebRender for example -- but I guess in time we'll see how that turns out. [1] one which I had a few issues was the multiprocess approach. That brought me some trouble at first but in the end got ironed out just fine.
ehsankia 7y ago
Anyone who's worked in the video game industry knows how insanely inconsistent compatibility can be on across different device configurations. With browsers using more and more GPU acceleration, it wouldn't surprising if some configurations have major performance bugs. The one thing with Chrome is that it has very good compatibility.
jay_kyburz 7y ago
Its also weird that nobody mentions what OS they are running. Firefox on Mac is really different than Firefox on windows.

jancsika 7y ago

That's really interesting because I've had the exact opposite experience. I switched from Firefox to Chromium after some problems I ran into on a laptop. The experience wasn't great, but I was willing to live with most of the issues. However, even after disabling all extensions, it still pegged my cpus and froze my machine, several times a day. I moved back to Firefox. No amount of features was going to make up for that disruption.

crispinb 7y ago

Similar to my experience. First on MacOS, then when I switched to dual-boot Win/Linux in 2018, I found it to be the same on all three platforms. I don't get extreme CPU & machine freeze often, but FF itself frequently (2 or 3 times a day) stops responding & I have to kill it. Shame, as there are things I really like about it (notably multi-account containers). But it just doesn't work well enough for me.

savingGrace 7y ago

Every now and then I see one of these articles that talks of the evils of Google. It makes me give Firefox a go again. Every single time I go back to Chrome. I've had 5 different computers and FF always freezes at some point on every one of them. I'm a front-end dev and having all of my working tabs go away is not great. Secondly, this last FF freeze (a couple days ago) blew up my profile. Google may not care about my privacy, but there are no alternatives.

amelius 7y ago
You could at least use Chromium instead of Chrome.
- hollerith 7y ago
  If I use Chromium, how would I get security updates in time? If there is no good answer to that, then how would I get warned of a vulnerability so that I can switch temporarily to Chrome till the vulnerability is fixed in Chromium?
acdha 7y ago
Have you tried starting with a clean profile and no extensions? It’s been many years since crashes have been common on Windows or MacOS – generally since they moved Flash into a separate process.