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Everyone's talking about what Firefox should do to beat chrome, and meanwhile here I am still suffering the bug that makes it unusable for many MacBooks with re

by kace91 7y ago

Everyone's talking about what Firefox should do to beat chrome, and meanwhile here I am still suffering the bug that makes it unusable for many MacBooks with retina screens set to "more space". Start Firefox and fans are blaring in seconds, hundreds of reports, years of waiting and no solution... Maybe making it usable in one of the most common devices for devs would be a start, I've got a full building of coworkers here waiting for a fix to try to come back.

Arctic_ 7y ago
Yep, same here. I really want to use Firefox but when it eats through my battery at twice the speed, I have to go with Chrome or Brave.
Medicalidiot 7y ago
Firefox is a dumpster fire on Mac. No pinch to zoom? Whatever. Scrolling issues? Whatever. Lighting up my CPU to the point it's noticeably warm on idle? Not cool. Having 60% of the battery life as Chrome and 50% of Safari? Unacceptable. Simply idling Firefox on my Mac would use almost the same amount of battery as actively browsing Safari. I love Firefox on my home Linux desktop, but that's as far as my love goes at the moment.
- grosswait 7y ago
  Wierd. I've been using Firefox Quantum Dev Edition on MBP for a few years now and it consistently uses less CPU and RAM than Chrome, with way too many tabs, and consequently better battery life by far. Power usage still lags behind Safari, but at least it doesn't give me the spinning beachball for 30 seconds on every other new tab after 3 hours of browsing with tons of tabs.
  - kace91 7y ago
    Do you have a retina mbp? And if so, do you have the screen resolution set up to the"more space" configuration in your macos system settings? Those two factors seem to make the problem worse for most users, since the power drain increases with your display resolution.
- pcwalton 7y ago
  Fixes are starting to land for the power consumption issues. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522
  - Medicalidiot 7y ago
    I saw that earlier, I'm hoping this resolves my issues, but we'll see.
awinder 7y ago
I would absolutely love to see a project like Camino start up again, that was the last time I had a tolerable experience with a “Mozilla browser”. I’m in alignment with what they want to do on the web but I’m on a Mac and the experience has just been not right for as long as I’ve been a Mac user. There’s obviously issues though given that project was 3rd party to the mozilla org, but if they’re not gonna build a nice Mac browser, can we not find a way for someone to & kick money back or something lol.
ledauphin 7y ago
Firefox got most of its early momentum from tech-savvy users recommending it to their friends and family. Many of us use retina MacBooks, and none of us can honestly recommend it since we can't use it ourselves. I understand from the bug report that it's not a trivial solution, but then again the new JS engine wasn't trivial either. Mozilla is going to have to step it up and realize that its own version of advertising is making power users want to evangelize.
- GeekyBear 7y ago
  For now, on a retina Mac, you can pick up significant power savings by having Firefox opt out of the OS wide window scaling when on a retina display. Get info on the Firefox app and then check ”Open in Low Resolution” on the get info panel, then restart the app. You can pick up more energy savings by telling Firefox to stop using transparent pixels. Go to about:config, and set gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true. Firefox has just been overloading the GPU by painting the entire window over and over and sending the output to the window compositor where it is slowed down even more by scaling and dealing with transparency.
jamroom 7y ago
Yep this is the ONE thing that kills FF for me. I use an external 4K display (via Display Port) on a 2015 15 inch MacBook Pro and Firefox basically just spins the fans up nonstop while it is running.
theferalrobot 7y ago
Same problem here, last time I mentioned this on HN I got an angry mob after me but its true. Firefox is totally unusable on a mac. I believe the culprit is the WebRender implementation FF has.
- dralley 7y ago
  That would be strange considering webrender is not enabled on Mac
GeekyBear 7y ago
The solution is to rebuild Firefox to use Core Animation to draw the window contents and then send only changes to that content to the graphics compositor after that instead of using the long deprecated OpenGL implementation it currently uses that repaints the whole screen over and over, so it's hardly surprising to see such a massive change take quite a while to implement. The earliest changes in this process have finally made it into beta and there are already substantial improvements in power usage/heat generated by an overworked GPU even before all the changes in progress have been enabled.
- kace91 7y ago
  Glad to hear that there's finally progress being made!(or if it has been on the way all this time, glad to see that it's finally getting to the point where final users can see a difference). Are you involved in the fix? If so, do you have a rough ETA for the remaining changes?
  - GeekyBear 7y ago
    I've just been reading the bugzilla discussions on the issue since back when people were first trying to figure out what was causing the issue. pcwalton is involved in the fix, and as he mentioned, really significant improvements are starting to land for testing in nightly with more fixes yet to come https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522

by kace91 7y ago

Arctic_ 7y ago

Yep, same here. I really want to use Firefox but when it eats through my battery at twice the speed, I have to go with Chrome or Brave.

Medicalidiot 7y ago

Firefox is a dumpster fire on Mac. No pinch to zoom? Whatever. Scrolling issues? Whatever. Lighting up my CPU to the point it's noticeably warm on idle? Not cool. Having 60% of the battery life as Chrome and 50% of Safari? Unacceptable. Simply idling Firefox on my Mac would use almost the same amount of battery as actively browsing Safari. I love Firefox on my home Linux desktop, but that's as far as my love goes at the moment.

grosswait 7y ago
Wierd. I've been using Firefox Quantum Dev Edition on MBP for a few years now and it consistently uses less CPU and RAM than Chrome, with way too many tabs, and consequently better battery life by far. Power usage still lags behind Safari, but at least it doesn't give me the spinning beachball for 30 seconds on every other new tab after 3 hours of browsing with tons of tabs.
- kace91 7y ago
  Do you have a retina mbp? And if so, do you have the screen resolution set up to the"more space" configuration in your macos system settings? Those two factors seem to make the problem worse for most users, since the power drain increases with your display resolution.
pcwalton 7y ago
Fixes are starting to land for the power consumption issues. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522
- Medicalidiot 7y ago
  I saw that earlier, I'm hoping this resolves my issues, but we'll see.

awinder 7y ago

I would absolutely love to see a project like Camino start up again, that was the last time I had a tolerable experience with a “Mozilla browser”. I’m in alignment with what they want to do on the web but I’m on a Mac and the experience has just been not right for as long as I’ve been a Mac user. There’s obviously issues though given that project was 3rd party to the mozilla org, but if they’re not gonna build a nice Mac browser, can we not find a way for someone to & kick money back or something lol.

ledauphin 7y ago

Firefox got most of its early momentum from tech-savvy users recommending it to their friends and family. Many of us use retina MacBooks, and none of us can honestly recommend it since we can't use it ourselves. I understand from the bug report that it's not a trivial solution, but then again the new JS engine wasn't trivial either. Mozilla is going to have to step it up and realize that its own version of advertising is making power users want to evangelize.

GeekyBear 7y ago
For now, on a retina Mac, you can pick up significant power savings by having Firefox opt out of the OS wide window scaling when on a retina display. Get info on the Firefox app and then check ”Open in Low Resolution” on the get info panel, then restart the app. You can pick up more energy savings by telling Firefox to stop using transparent pixels. Go to about:config, and set gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true. Firefox has just been overloading the GPU by painting the entire window over and over and sending the output to the window compositor where it is slowed down even more by scaling and dealing with transparency.

jamroom 7y ago

Yep this is the ONE thing that kills FF for me. I use an external 4K display (via Display Port) on a 2015 15 inch MacBook Pro and Firefox basically just spins the fans up nonstop while it is running.

theferalrobot 7y ago

Same problem here, last time I mentioned this on HN I got an angry mob after me but its true. Firefox is totally unusable on a mac. I believe the culprit is the WebRender implementation FF has.

dralley 7y ago
That would be strange considering webrender is not enabled on Mac

GeekyBear 7y ago

The solution is to rebuild Firefox to use Core Animation to draw the window contents and then send only changes to that content to the graphics compositor after that instead of using the long deprecated OpenGL implementation it currently uses that repaints the whole screen over and over, so it's hardly surprising to see such a massive change take quite a while to implement. The earliest changes in this process have finally made it into beta and there are already substantial improvements in power usage/heat generated by an overworked GPU even before all the changes in progress have been enabled.

kace91 7y ago
Glad to hear that there's finally progress being made!(or if it has been on the way all this time, glad to see that it's finally getting to the point where final users can see a difference). Are you involved in the fix? If so, do you have a rough ETA for the remaining changes?
- GeekyBear 7y ago
  I've just been reading the bugzilla discussions on the issue since back when people were first trying to figure out what was causing the issue. pcwalton is involved in the fix, and as he mentioned, really significant improvements are starting to land for testing in nightly with more fixes yet to come https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522