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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

I was a long-time FF user and yesterday I switched to Brave. Why? Because of ridiculously high CPU usage of FF on my Mac (M1, to be specific). I was surprised to realize that Brave uses less CPU when playing a 4K video, compared to a FF with no tabs!

I really wish Mozilla would address battery/CPU issues of FF first. I'm not an ordinary user, but I can see why many people would just pick Chrome/Brave/Safari if they realize FF drains their battery too fast.

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Does Firefox not have hardware decoding support on the M1? Did the API change when Apple changed architectures or something?

Youtube and Chrome have the same CPU usage on my machine when playing 4K60 video (downscaled to 2K even for even more load). Tested on Firefox and Chrome using this video: http://ftp.vim.org/ftp/ftp/pub/graphics/blender/demo/movies/... (had to hack in a <video> element on the parent page to get it to play instead of download). Firefox uses about 150% of a CPU core, Chrome about 160%. CPU is a i7-7700k, GPU is a GTX1080 but I'm on Ubuntu so the latest Nvidia update probably broke something to get these load numbers.

Many bloated Javascript websites are slower on Firefox for sure, but video playback is one of those things it seems to handle fine (or, just as badly as their competitors do).

TBH, Firefox seems snappier than Chromium-based browsers. Check your extensions.

Are you saying specifically on the M1 Mac or on all machines? I have not personally noticed Firefox ever taking a lot of CPU on my machine

Are you sure it was using hardware acceleration?

yes it was.

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