Can anyone shed some light on why Facebook is such a resource hog on Chrome and Firefox but not on Edge/IE? It only seems to be on the home feed whereby CPU usage will ramp above 50% on Chrome and up to nearly 100% on Firefox - both latest builds and both with or without plugins, they don't cause or affect the CPU usage when turned on or off. Oddly, when on my profile page, the CPU load drops to a normal browsing level. After lots of web searching, I'm not the only one that's suffering with this but there seems to be no obvious solution other than "don't use Chrome or Firefox", which isn't a solution. Has anyone else come across this, or could anyone please test and suggest a solution?
In my experience, It's usually one of the following: JavaScript Auto-playing video/ad somewhere on the page Browser add-on
I am using an adblocker, but it makes no difference if I remove it and restart the browser so don’t think it’s that. I’ve disabled auto play for video content and no change and also updated Java too. Also, I ran Firefox completely stock, no addons etc and still got max cpu usage. At a bit of a loss?!?
Not Java, Javascript... Basically on Facebook, Twitter etc, there's a gazillion Javascript scripts going off in the background and the resulting mess are why their respective tabs end up eating all the RAM, but it can also cause the high CPU usage. FWIW Chrome has a built-in task manager [Shift + Esc] which will tell you which tab or bit of the browser is eating the CPU, for me it reported:
If it's scripts, you could try running the ghostery add on. Also completely unrelated but if you do have the java browser plugin extension you should probably get rid of it.
I would suggest leaving it on, I suspected an ad at first. Ghostery is a proprietary add-on owned by...an advertising company. Use it if you wish but you're an idiot if you choose it over something like privacy badger and uBlock. I suggest trying uMatrix/noscript and selectively enabling/disabling different javascript running. Have a look at about: performance too. I suspect it's something in your newsfeed (a video, an ad, etc.) that is causing such high CPU usage.
Thanks for the insight. If it's one particular ad/video etc, then why doesn't Edge or IE exhibit the same symptoms?
So, uMatrix solved the issue. I don't really understand how or why just yet, but simply installing the addon returned the CPU usage to 4%, where it should be. Thank you very much for the advice.
