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by sutoor 3026 days ago
Sadly, still unusable for me since the Quantum update.

A clean install and profile, no add-ons, and google.com/maps (for example) will max out my cpu. There must be some bug related to old hardware and OS (Macbook Pro 2009 + 10.11.x) or more people would be experiencing this.

14 comments

Hi! I'm collecting profiles on cases like yours.

Here are instructions if you'd like to help: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7knnn4/firefox_qua...

Thanks, I will do so.

When Firefox optimised for multi-process, did they test for single-core? I'm on a machine released this decade - a rare instance of a single core x86_64 machine (fanless Atom NUC)

Facebook is pretty much now unusable with they do their asynchronous page loading of stories.

I haven't actually checked if firefox was eating my CPU but with my pre-quantum profile on post-quantum Firefox (connected to firefox Sync) Firefox would essentially lock up whenever I was on a page with a lot of Canvas stuff. I made a fresh profile and the issue was gone. Don't know if this is at all related to what you're collecting.
I have a 2017 macbook pro, battery life is atrocious with Firefox now. If anyone from the power optimization team is reading this what logs can I provide you?
Mike Conley has picked up the Quantum performance baton from Ehsan, and has started posting Performance fixes on his blog [1]. Please write to him; he is good with replying, and will provide instructions on how to profile your Mac machines.

1. https://mikeconley.ca/blog/2018/03/01/firefox-performance-up...

I noticed that too. Firefox does not work efficiently on macOS, unfortunately.

Additionally, Google doesn't do much to fix their web apps performance on Firefox. I even suspect the contrary.

I suspect Google engineers have more important tickets to work on than "do a bunch of complicated VM analysis to slow down Maps on Firefox."
The test framework, or some live analytics, show your change makes Chrome 1 second faster and Firefox 2 seconds slower (in a 2 minute representative test). Do you push the change?
I have been having problems with Google Maps too, and Google Hangouts has been even worse. I'm pretty much at the point now where I have asked people to contact me on different services because Hangouts has become completely unusable.

I was assuming that this was just Google not caring about Firefox support. But now that you mention it, this seems to have started around the time of the Quantum update and doesn't affect all my machines. So maybe I'm experiencing this bug as well? I never connected the two things.

Google had a NPAPI plugin for non Chrome browsers and proprietary webRTC extensions for Chrome, so when legacy plugin support was removed, it stopped working for voice/video calls in Firefox. Hangouts Meet is even worse, being Chrome only, though officially Google was looking into it.
You are not alone. Firefox is unusable for me on my mac book pro 15' 2015. HTML 5 videos are basically a slideshow.

On my PC with windows 10, Firefox eat 25% to 30% of my CPU looking at a twitch stream (1080p60). Chrome and Edge will use about 5% while looking at the same stream.

I think I must be hitting something like this too— Mid 2014 MBP running 10.11.6. I tried Quantum when it came out and used it exclusively for about a week, but there were just a myriad of small problems around performance. It would eat CPU and RAM, input would lag especially text entry, Hangouts didn't work, etc. And then on top of that a bunch of annoying interop issues like problems with the 1password extension ("the add-on could not be downloaded because of a connection failure"), not being able to right-click selected text and access the Services menu.

I really want to love Firefox, and I'm giving it another try with 59, but at the end of the day I need my computer to work for me. :(

For me Google maps loads fine, then a second or two later it will freeze for ~5 seconds, then go back to working normally. (i7 MBP 2017, OSX 10.13.3, Firefox 59)
Working perfectly here. Firefox 59.0.1 OS X 10.11.6 MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2009) 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 MB
hey, I have a similar issue on PC. It's not that the CPU maxes out but that everything grounds to a halt, especially when typing in text boxes on JS-heavy sites.

I'm on HN, right? Totally fine. Amazing browser. I hit up Twitter, and I could be stuck halfway through a tweet and it freezes up for a good minute or two. Same on FB, same on many other sites.

I LOVE the browser but on my laptop (Thinkpad), I had to switch back to Chrome.

The issues came about with the Quantum update for me as well.

I have something similar on my MBP late 2012, running latest OS. I've switched to Safari on that machine to avoid running out of battery and maxing the fans.
Same for me on a 3.5 GHz Intel Core i7 13" Macbook pro. I had to revert back to Chrome.

e.g. Animations on stripe.com would auto max out my CPU.

Same for the mobile version. It's unusable on single core devices.
Same. Totally bogs down my maxed out Macbook Pro on some HTML5 video.