Firefox: Heat and the CPU Usage Problem

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Firefox is still having problems with high CPU utilization that is causing some people, particularly laptop owners, to get hot under the collar.

This is documented on a Mozilla support page entitled "Firefox consumes a lot of CPU resources." The page states: "At times, Firefox may require significant CPU [central processing unit] resources in order to download, process, and display Web content." And forum postings like this one about a Dell Netbook are not uncommon: "Mini9 would get way too hot."
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I find many of the times that Firefox is taking up large amounts of CPU cycles, it is usually due to a poorly programed flash applet.
 
firefox is crap they fucked it up with their "awesome bar" haven't looked never back.
 
Fafeifa said:
firefox is crap they fucked it up with their "awesome bar" haven't looked never back.
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Thus why I disabled that stupid thing but you can't get me to give up Firefox and it's extensions for anything.

I don't put all the blame on Firefox itself. Flash is usually the heat generator for my laptop. If I stream something like Hulu or ESPN360 it gets hot pretty quick.

Thus why I like that Adobe is using hardware acceleration now with Flash 10.1 and why MS is moving IE9 rendering to the GPU as well. Use all that hardware I purchased dammit! Don't cook just the CPU!
 
This is very interesting. I was having laptop overheat/shutdown issues when streaming flash video from ESPN, for example. I'll try Internet Explorer for a comparison.
 
I've noticed FF using a lot of CPU lately, too. Personally, I love the functionality of the awesomebar. However, with the default 90-day history, it bogs down pretty bad on the Pentium-M 1.4 that I have at work. Cutting the history down to 15 days made a huge difference.

On another topic, Steve, why does the link in your post go to the HOCP story page rather than the original article?
 
FF would only do that for me whenever I was on Hotmail, but a quick restart of the browser usually fixed it. Now that I think about it, it hasn't happened in a couple of months now.

OhgodIjustjinxedit. :p
 
On my netbook I gave up on firefox (especially considering the firefox build on linux isn't very resource friendly). I now use Chromium and have never looked back since
 
I notice firefox often using hundreds of MB of ram when ie would only use several dozen while running the same pages. Haven't noticed the cpu cycles.
 
Fafeifa said:
firefox is crap they fucked it up with their "awesome bar" haven't looked never back.
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It's funny how after something starts getting popular, it's "hip" to hate it. Firefox used to be this "rebel" browser that all the cool nerds used because Mozilla and IE were too bloated...

I for one like the awesome bar. If I want to go back to a website, I just need to type a couple of letters into the bar and it pops up, complete with an icon to make it easier to identify. Much quicker than messing around with some menu or list of previously listed websites.

My biggest wish for Firefox is for it to get better multi-core support. Even with tons of intensive websites open, I've never seen it use more than 25% CPU on my X4 desktop system, or 50% on my C2D laptop...
 
Come on, a browser causing overheating issues? Sounds more like a laptop engineering issue to me.

It shouldn't matter how much of the CPU a program uses; laptops should be designed to deal with it.
 
Also if a laptop overheats because of high CPU usage, the problem isn't Firefox, but the cooling of the laptop.
 
SockMan! said:
Come on, a browser causing overheating issues? Sounds more like a laptop engineering issue to me.

It shouldn't matter how much of the CPU a program uses; laptops should be designed to deal with it.
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Guess you didn't read the article, especially the part that says Safari had no issues browsing on the same sites.
 
i find on my ageing powerbook g4, firefox + flash = aluminium hotplate - and safari isnt much better.

however - firefox 4 lyfe.
 
Keiichi said:
Guess you didn't read the article, especially the part that says Safari had no issues browsing on the same sites.
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Maybe Firefox is a resource hog; maybe not. But that's irrelevant. The laptop shouldn't be overheating regardless of what I'm doing (unless I'm downright abusing the thing). If a single every-day-use program is enough to cause a meltdown, then I shudder to think what the more demanding programs will do.

Instead of me changing what programs I use, how about the engineers go back to the drawing board and make the vents larger, the CPU throttle down more, the fans spin faster and more often, or downright redesigning the entire cooling system?
 
SockMan! said:
Maybe Firefox is a resource hog; maybe not. But that's irrelevant. The laptop shouldn't be overheating regardless of what I'm doing (unless I'm downright abusing the thing). If a single every-day-use program is enough to cause a meltdown, then I shudder to think what the more demanding programs will do.

Instead of me changing what programs I use, how about the engineers go back to the drawing board and make the vents larger, the CPU throttle down more, the fans spin faster and more often, or downright redesigning the entire cooling system?
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TLDR

Did you even read the article?

This is mainly happening to netbooks, where there really isn't much more you can engineer. If you have two programs that do the exact same thing on the exact same platform, and program A causes issues, but program B doesn't, guess which is faulty, it's not the platform.

This is all on the firefox developers. Don't blame it on something else just because it's not going the way you want it to go.
 
SockMan! said:
Maybe Firefox is a resource hog; maybe not. But that's irrelevant. The laptop shouldn't be overheating regardless of what I'm doing (unless I'm downright abusing the thing). If a single every-day-use program is enough to cause a meltdown, then I shudder to think what the more demanding programs will do.

Instead of me changing what programs I use, how about the engineers go back to the drawing board and make the vents larger, the CPU throttle down more, the fans spin faster and more often, or downright redesigning the entire cooling system?
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:facepalm:
 
I ditched FireFox a long time ago. FireFox is a prime example that even open-source software evolves into the same bloated shitware that most closed software does.
 
I run an insane amount of tabs in FF and will continue to do so, mine does not use many MB it uses about 1.3GB of ram usually. It does seem to use about 50% of my CPU and flash does seem to help it. I'm using cat 9.11 but I didn't know to try flash 10.1 I might already have it. Seemed to make some difference in rendering some HD flash videos. I don't pretend to even know what the cause is but yeah it is a problem. Then other times it behaves and just wakes up a few times to use abou 32% then sleeps til I use it. I wonder whats going on really and sometimes I wouldn't care if it made pages sleep til you came back to focus on them, I know pages that require a connection and gifs flash and other things would not rotate but I'd try it for the price of lower usage.

I didn't know the new address bar was called the awesome bar, I don't think it takes up much resources at all, its SQLlite based.
 
SockMan! said:
Maybe Firefox is a resource hog; maybe not. But that's irrelevant. The laptop shouldn't be overheating regardless of what I'm doing (unless I'm downright abusing the thing). If a single every-day-use program is enough to cause a meltdown, then I shudder to think what the more demanding programs will do.

Instead of me changing what programs I use, how about the engineers go back to the drawing board and make the vents larger, the CPU throttle down more, the fans spin faster and more often, or downright redesigning the entire cooling system?
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I gotta agree.

In other terms, it is capacity planning. Any production piece of equipment should be able to sit there at 100% utilization and disperse enough cooling to cool the equipment and remain cool enough for the user to operate comfortably.

Firefox doesn't make the laptop hot. XYZ program uses more processing power, which heats up the cpu, where the cooling system has a hard time removing the heat.
 
Fark_Maniac said:
I gotta agree.

In other terms, it is capacity planning. Any production piece of equipment should be able to sit there at 100% utilization and disperse enough cooling to cool the equipment and remain cool enough for the user to operate comfortably.

Firefox doesn't make the laptop hot. XYZ program uses more processing power, which heats up the cpu, where the cooling system has a hard time removing the heat.
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you have to remember, it's a netbook, not a gaming station.

Most of it is semi-passive, anyways. (looking at original EEEPC design), and was not designed for anything more then a seriously cut-down linux install with FF2.0.


Tops. Not the newer FF3.6beta or whatnot.
 
Fark_Maniac said:
In other terms, it is capacity planning. Any production piece of equipment should be able to sit there at 100% utilization and disperse enough cooling to cool the equipment and remain cool enough for the user to operate comfortably.
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By that definition all gaming laptops fail their Q/A. God forbid someone gets burned playing a game on their F-Bomb (Clevo D900K)
 
Fark_Maniac said:
I gotta agree.

In other terms, it is capacity planning. Any production piece of equipment should be able to sit there at 100% utilization and disperse enough cooling to cool the equipment and remain cool enough for the user to operate comfortably.

Firefox doesn't make the laptop hot. XYZ program uses more processing power, which heats up the cpu, where the cooling system has a hard time removing the heat.
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You're both missing the point though.

'Hot' doesn't mean 'Too Hot'. And not overheating doesn't mean that nothing is wrong.

Firefox = Shorter battery life.
Firefox = Slower busier CPU.
Firefox = Less memory available.
 
the problem is pos flash and java applets when some one doesnt have a gpu/igp that supports hardware acceleration.. its not firefox.. opera and firefox use the same amount of ram and the same amount of cpu usage.. its called useless uneducated people bitching about software they dont know about..
 
Nemesis999 said:
You're both missing the point though.

'Hot' doesn't mean 'Too Hot'. And not overheating doesn't mean that nothing is wrong.
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I'll concede to your (and the previous posters) point and admit that Firefox is probably not optimized as well as it should be compared to other browsers. That's really all that I can say at this point since I personally don't have an issue with Firefox and don't extensively use the other browsers.

However, I consider anything hot enough to have people complaining and switching to a different program to resolve an issue is "too hot". At which point, it's not an overheating issue but rather a comfort/ergonomic issue. Who's to blame for that is even muddier than if it were a pure capacity planning issue - after all a lot of people use their laptops in their lap. You can't blame a program for a guy's balls shriveling.
 
Some one get Al Gore on the phone. FireFox is adding to global warming. (no internet access for you)

But it is called "Fire" fox.
 
Gore doesn't use firefox. He uses Lynx, because it saves the environment.


Anyways, about once a month, my wife's computer goes to 100% fan speed sometimes with "only" firefox open.

Hey, try opening a few tabs of this with your laptop: https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/StockTicker/

My laptop fan started getting busy with three tabs at 1ms speed.
 
Fark_Maniac said:
I gotta agree.

In other terms, it is capacity planning. Any production piece of equipment should be able to sit there at 100% utilization and disperse enough cooling to cool the equipment and remain cool enough for the user to operate comfortably.

Firefox doesn't make the laptop hot. XYZ program uses more processing power, which heats up the cpu, where the cooling system has a hard time removing the heat.
Click to expand...

Ignoring the heat issues, firefox still uses more battery power than IE8 which is a bigger problem for netbook and laptops while unplugged.

Furthermore, the reason netbooks and laptops run warmer than some people like while at full load is because people have VOTED WITH THEIR WALLETS to say warmer + quieter is more important than loud and cool.
 
One thing I've noticed on my Vista laptop (a basic dual-core Vaio) is that Firefox runs about 50% CPU when I have Gmail open. Other sites are fine, but Gmail really thrashes my CPU.
 
Lemurion said:
One thing I've noticed on my Vista laptop (a basic dual-core Vaio) is that Firefox runs about 50% CPU when I have Gmail open. Other sites are fine, but Gmail really thrashes my CPU.
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It's googlegears.
 
sirmonkey1985 said:
the problem is pos flash and java applets when some one doesnt have a gpu/igp that supports hardware acceleration.. its not firefox.. opera and firefox use the same amount of ram and the same amount of cpu usage.. its called useless uneducated people bitching about software they dont know about..
Click to expand...
+1 i don't see any abnormal CPU usage with my firefox installation and my web surfing habits...
 
FF did something rare to me yesterday. It crashed! :eek: And while I was using FireFTP to upload a 350 MB file. But it recovered everything just fine (all tabs) and FireFTP was able to resume from where it left off. :)
 
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