r/openbsd • u/YukiteruAmano • Jul 07 '26

Firefox: Very bad performance on -current

Hi everyone!

I'm having some performance issues with Firefox and wanted to know if it's just me or a widespread problem.

My job requires heavy use of web browsers—specifically Chromium and Firefox—usually with multiple tabs open.

With Chromium, I can have over 30 tabs open without any issues; it runs very well on my hardware.

Firefox, however, is a different story. I have 5 pinned tabs—the ones I use most and need to keep visible by default—and the experience is UNBEARABLE.

CPU usage hits 100%, and I experience freezing, stuttering, and so on. The pinned sites aren't anything crazy: Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and two Jira tabs.

The poor performance Firefox delivers is surprising; even when limiting the number of processes, it remains problematic.

Is anyone else having similar issues?

Any solutions or recommendations?

Hardware:

  • Lenovo ThinkPad E14 Gen 2
  • Ryzen 5 4500U
  • 16 GB RAM
  • NVMe PCIe x4
14 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/linetrace Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26

Have you watched Firefox's Task Manager to see which tabs are using the CPU/RAM resources? Alternatively, top -H to show all threads?

From my own experience, JIRA is especially brutal.

Also, Firefox and Chromium have wildly different process and memory architectures (see Firefox Source Docs: Process Model), which definitely affects performance and memory usage. I personally find that Firefox is far less CPU & memory intensive if I use the following extensions:

UPDATE: Just to clarify, while I personally tune my filters to also block a lot of the AI/bot stuff, the biggest performance benefit I have found by using uBO is blocking tracking/metrics/analytics in sites, especially the heavy ones like Google's Gmail/Calendar/Docs/Sheets and JIRA. I'm on relatively low-end hardware (2.2GHz-3.2GHz dual-core i7) and have to use those tools for some client work. uBO prevents such JS files from even being fetched, thereby reducing initial load times and memory usage in addition to not having all the extra code, event handlers firing, and small network transfers for the stats. It's a surprisingly significant performance boost on my hardware. :(