Gave it a shot. My complaints on 20m of usage (2015 MBP):
1. Firefox is sitting at 15-20% of my CPU with 2 tabs open. I've never had the fan come on just from browsing tabs on chrome. I opened gmail while typing this and now I'm at about 50% of my CPU and the fan is blaring. Something seems very wrong.
2. The import from other browser (assuming say I already had an old version installed and selected "replace" on mac install) option is VERY hidden behind a bunch of menus. It also didn't import any of my cookies to google, HN, or probably most other passwords in the keychain.
3. Resizing a window feels really sluggish and not snappy, as does tabbing back and forth between tabs. It takes a noticable like 500-800ms to switch to gmail. Most tabs are around 200-400ms. This feels massively slower than chrome thus far
4. The design when typing in the search bar is pretty jarring, filling up a huge amount with white space.
I'll keep trying but if the CPU doesn't chill out this is basically a non-starter for me.
Its hogging the crap out of my CPU (turns fans on) and is noticably slower than chrome on my 2015 MBP. Much respect to the devs at Mozilla, but my user experience hasn't been great thus far.
Just installed it. And had gmail running on it and Chrome at the same time. Firefox Nightly showed to be using significant power while Chrome was not. I think this still has a long way to go before I switch to Firefox both in terms of performance and dev tools.
I switched because CPU usage on Mac OS was so much higher under Firefox than Chrome. I tried so many different things, following suggestions in Bugzilla, HN comments and just about every site I could find through DDG and Google. Nothing worked, and usually when I bring it up people dismiss the complaint with "it's better than it used to be", "it's not that bad" or "it's just you". But I'm not the only person complaining (or being dismissed outright).
To be clear, it's not pegging any core at 100% or anything so extreme. But it causes my laptop to heat up and my fans to kick in very frequently - something that almost never happens with Chromium/Webkit/Blink based browsers. If I primarily used a desktop, I wouldn't even have noticed, but a warm lap and constant fan noise makes it unusable for me.
Safari was out because I needed to run multiple browser profiles concurrently (something Firefox and Chrome support readily).
I've recently switched from Mac OS to Windows but my experience (as recently as a month ago) with Firefox leaves me feeling that it's the less mature implementation with an over zealous fan base ("it's not us, it's you!").
Strange, I run Firefox developer edition on a 2015 dual core MBP and have no issues what so ever. I think it is more responsive than chrome and uses less memory.
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.
Exactly the same with me: I tried switching to Firefox 63 last week on a 2015 MBP running MacOS 10.11, and compared to Chrome it seems to use a lot more CPU and thus makes my machine run noticeably hotter.
I guess this might be due to the new Rust layout engine I've heard about which is more parallelised?, but even just having a single tab playing youtube or a gif uses more CPU in Firefox, so maybe it's something with hardware acceleration?
Unfortunately, looks like the CPU spikes are still a problem on OS X for me.
I check this every time a new version is released as I'd love to make the switch from Chrome, but Firefox with one blank tab and no extensions uses more CPU than Chrome with 15 actual tabs. When I actually throw activity at Firefox it hogs the CPU even more.
Goodwill, as I like Mozilla much more than Google. I kind of dislike the Chrome UI, but that's a minor point.
A lot of FF is hare-brained, though. E10S solved the unresponsive UI for me, but for the life of me, I don't know how to enable it on my touchscreen Dell. There is no indicator in preferences that tells me whether it is on or off and no button to simply force it.
Javascript-heavy websites tend to burn through the CPU of my Macbook Air, but I don't know how to throttle background tabs. Or at least profile which tab gobbles my cycles. About:performance is not that helpful. Ideally, there would be some indicator if a background tab eats more than x% CPU.
I've been using FF for a couple of months and I get huge random CPU spikes on my MBP that go away once I restart it. It works fine on my iMac and Windows tower though albeit JS execution seems slower (I mostly work on front end stuff).
It also seems to consume more battery on Android than Chrome although I admit I've never made any serious testing.
I felt the opposite. All the examples seemed fast and the differences seemed negligible. I wonder if our internet connections / platforms were different. I was using chrome on a 2015 MBP with ~decentish wifi.
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?
It runs fine on my macbook pro. It drains the battery in some instances, yeah, but then again so do heavy HTML5 sites like turntable (which is currently taking 50% cpu, the most power hungry process out of EVERYTHING I'm running, all for playing music and displaying some 2-dimensional sprites and a chat room).
What I really notice is that all of these web technologies designed to improve the user experience chew through multiple orders of magnitude more CPU than a native app. 2-4x more I could understand. Hell, I'd even settle for 10x, but when it's going over 100x for poster-child quality HTML5 or Flash sites (which are not by any means impressive compared to a native app), something's definitely wrong.
1. Firefox is sitting at 15-20% of my CPU with 2 tabs open. I've never had the fan come on just from browsing tabs on chrome. I opened gmail while typing this and now I'm at about 50% of my CPU and the fan is blaring. Something seems very wrong.
2. The import from other browser (assuming say I already had an old version installed and selected "replace" on mac install) option is VERY hidden behind a bunch of menus. It also didn't import any of my cookies to google, HN, or probably most other passwords in the keychain.
3. Resizing a window feels really sluggish and not snappy, as does tabbing back and forth between tabs. It takes a noticable like 500-800ms to switch to gmail. Most tabs are around 200-400ms. This feels massively slower than chrome thus far
4. The design when typing in the search bar is pretty jarring, filling up a huge amount with white space.
I'll keep trying but if the CPU doesn't chill out this is basically a non-starter for me.
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