Why does FireFox4 Spool up my CF setup when going on internet???

[newls1]

I just installed the new FF4 and I noticed now that when I go on the internet, my CF setup spools up and fan increase in speed like when I go play a game or something!! Whats up with this

 

[Jeremy C]

FF4 uses GPU acceleration for things like flash, now.

I uninstalled it and went back to 3.6 and use IE9 if I need hardware acceleration as it seems to use it better than FF does. You can turn the hardware acceleration off in options if you want.

 

[newls1]

ok, thanks bro....

 

[Yakk]

Yeah, and I isolated Firefox 4 as THE issue I'm having since yesterday with my ATI 5870 staying at 900mhz instead of powering down to 157mhz on desktop. Also makes the GPU fan go up. Happens after a bit use use.

Remove Firefox 4, issue goes away, GPU powers down to 157mhz.. If anybody else can confirm this issue.

sigh...


Y.

 

[Renesis13B]

You can easily disable hardware acceleration if you don't want it.

http://www.trishtech.com/internet/disable_hardware_acceleration_in_firefox_4.php

 

[Cube]

Becuase Firefox uses CPU and GPU and is a horrible mess of coding that eat up a ton ass load of system resources it's like the windows vista of web browsers.

Use a real browser like Oprea or Chrome that don't eat up system resources and run horrible every body knows it even mozilla they said to max pc.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/mozilla_admits_firefox_has_cpu_usage_problems

 

[Renesis13B]

That article was posted on 11/23/2009.

Becuase Firefox uses CPU and GPU and is a horrible mess of coding that eat up a ton ass load of system resources it's like the windows vista of web browsers.

Use a real browser like Oprea or Chrome that don't eat up system resources and run horrible every body knows it even mozilla they said to max pc.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/mozilla_admits_firefox_has_cpu_usage_problems

 

[andrewfee]

Preferences > Advanced > General: Use hardware acceleration when available checkbox.

Hardware acceleration is far more than just flash video though, and page rendering/responsiveness is noticeably improved even on quicker machines in my experience.

 

[mannyman]

That article was posted on 11/23/2009.

lol fail on his part, i love FF it works well, anyone who says it doesnt is a liar, also 4 is still beta its going to be glitchy deal with it, and use up resources? wow a whopping 121mb!? wow thats so much in a modern computer...

 

[Yakk]

I've been using FireFox for years... (adblocker is gold, except for some select sites I like to encourage )

Tried a few of the many, many RC's a while back, was ok...*shrug*

Anyhow, using the GPU is great & all, just annoying it keeps disabling the power saving features of the GPU, even when it's closed after using.

Used Opera, might use again actually... not getting anywhere near chrome... *shivers*


Y.

Disabled GPU accel. until this gets worked out.

 

[Forceman]

lol fail on his part, i love FF it works well, anyone who says it doesnt is a liar, also 4 is still beta its going to be glitchy deal with it, and use up resources? wow a whopping 121mb!? wow thats so much in a modern computer...

Ummm, FireFox 4 was released yesterday, so pretty sure he isn't talking about the beta any longer.

 

[Dark12]

Becuase Firefox uses CPU and GPU and is a horrible mess of coding that eat up a ton ass load of system resources it's like the windows vista of web browsers.

Use a real browser like Oprea or Chrome that don't eat up system resources and run horrible every body knows it even mozilla they said to max pc.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/mozilla_admits_firefox_has_cpu_usage_problems

Occupation
collage student

No, I'm not joking.

 

[defaultluser]

Preferences > Advanced > General: Use hardware acceleration when available checkbox.

Hardware acceleration is far more than just flash video though, and page rendering/responsiveness is noticeably improved even on quicker machines in my experience.

Yeah, if you want to use Firefox 4 you'd better leave the GPU acceleration on, or else you should just stick with the old and busted 3.6.

Still, it's broken if FF4 completely spins-up your GPU out of idle. Windows Aero doesn't require that, so it's obviously not necessary to clock it at full speed just to do some Direct 2D calls. But it seems this has been broken for some time, although the problem is intermittent from machine-to-machine:

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=185531

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2137513

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=260&threadid=148577

Looks like they have a serious bug that needs fixing. This is going to KILL battery life on notebooks

 

[mastrdrver]

Yea I noticed the clocks on my 5870 would swing all the way to 3D clocks back down to idle desktop 2D clocks.

I did find for myself that uninstalling Java 6 update 24 fixed about 98% of the problem. I unchecked "disabled crossfire power settings" also. Since doing those two things I've been on ~6 hours and no stuck 3D clocks with odd 100% loads. This is with hardware acceleration enabled too.

 

[Seb1]

You can disable Direct2D acceleration, and leave Direct3D on - try it !
From the Firefox TweakGuides:

gfx.direct2d.disabled [Boolean] - Firefox 4.0 has introduced hardware acceleration features which utilize the GPU to improve performance in certain scenarios. Under Windows Vista and 7, this hardware acceleration uses both Direct2D and Direct3D, whereas under XP only Direct3D is available. If hardware acceleration is enabled, then you can set this preference to True to only disable Direct2D acceleration without disabling Direct3D acceleration. This will rectify the blurry/alternate text rendering method in Firefox in return for a drop in performance. See the 'Use hardware acceleration when available' setting of the Firefox Settings section for full details. New to Firefox 4.0

 

[Scholzpdx]

Just installed FF4 to check out the GPU accel...

WOW! So much faster than Chrome now. I'm making the switch again!

 

[andrewfee]

Just installed FF4 to check out the GPU accel...

WOW! So much faster than Chrome now. I'm making the switch again!

Personally I've never liked chrome or other WebKit based browsers. That engine has a tendency to choke with large images or animated .gifs. I also hate the way that Chrome runs every tab in its own process cluttering up the task manager. It's also a really great way of hiding memory usage. I'm glad that Firefox 4 is now clearly quicker than anything on WebKit in actual use (a lot of the benchmarks used are not indicative of real-world performance in my opinion) at least on the systems that I've tried it on. On OSX it's the quickest browser by a large margin compared to the latest Safari and Chrome 10.

Font rendering doesn't seem as good in Chrome—though I've not tried the Windows version recently (CPU & Motherboard are being RMA'd, using a Mac right now) and if I shrink a page text gets very aliased. Chrome removed colour management entirely, and it's been broken in Safari for a long time now. (renders incorrectly) While Firefox dropped ICCv4 support when they switched to a new colour management engine in v3.5 (3.0 supported v2 and v4 profiles) it's still the only browser that can properly render the web on a wide gamut display without the colour being completely oversaturated.

In about:config if you set gfx.color_management.mode to 1, it treats all untagged images and HTML colours as sRGB—which is how things are supposed to look on the web, but you will probably need a correctly profiled monitor for things to display correctly.


I think it's funny that so many people still cling to the old "but firefox uses so much memory!" line when it has been proven time and time again that Firefox is probably the leanest browser around for memory usage once you have more than a couple of tabs open, and has been since 3.0.

Here is the first result I got when looking for a Firefox 3.0 memory test:


And Firefox 3.6 from Toms Hardware:



But not only that—memory is there to be used. In any situation, you ideally want your memory usage on a PC to be as close to 100% as possible—as long as the memory that is non-critical can instantly be used by another application if needed. OSX is actually really good about breaking up the display of memory usage into Free, Wired, Active and Inactive, rather than just Total/Available like Windows does.

Free memory is wasted memory, and tends to be very low after you start opening a few applications.
Wired memory is memory that is critical to an application.
Active memory is memory that is in use, but will be cleared as soon as another application needs to use it. (so it might be the page cache of an inactive web browser for example)
Inactive memory is memory that has data in it but is no longer used. I believe this is used when you quit an application for example. It's kept in memory until that memory is requested, to speed up re-opening that application.

In terms of priority when memory is requested, it's Free > Inactive > Active, and Wired is only used when you're out of memory and have to start paging to disk.

I'm quite sure that Windows operates in a similar fashion, it just doesn't make it clear to the user, so you have people complaining about big memory usage numbers, when a large portion of that is probably memory that is released as soon as another application requests it.

This has actually hurt the performance on systems that do have a lot of memory, as Firefox has a tendency to be very aggressive about clearing images out of its cache in background tabs, which means that they need to be rendered again more frequently when you switch back to a tab. (noticeable on slower systems when colour management is enabled as that slows down image rendering somewhat) It's improved a great deal in Firefox 4 but that annoyed me for a long time.