Why is Pale Moon so laggy on specific websites and why does it take so much CPU power?

[ashoka232]

Hey all, I recently got Pale Moon and have been messing around with the customisation. After that, I decided to actually try out the browser. It's nothing special, not fast but not slow. Specific websites however, seem to run unbearably slow.

Youtube for example gets extremely choppy when scrolling, even when only going one scroll notch at a time. Reddit is the same. When I load these sites, the browser freezes for a little bit. Upon scrolling, they react in a very sluggish and choppy manner.

Other websites such as Google, the Pale Moon extensions website, Toms Hardware and JB-HI-FI seem to work mostly fine, with the occasional choppiness here and there.

I have also discovered that, when having the same three tabs open on both the latest version of Firefox and Pale Moon, Firefox only takes about 0.3-1% CPU with the browser open on idle. On the other hand, when Pale Moon is open and idle, it jumps all the way to 10% CPU usage, which makes the power usage react by saying Pale Moon is "Very High". Pale moon does seem to take roughly 500mb less Ram than Firefox though.

- Ryzen 5 3600

- 16gb RAM.

[suzyne]

Welcome!

I can't explain "the why" because I am just another Pale Moon user, but have you tried the AVX2 version found here: viewtopic.php?f=40&t=27873 ?

I find that it significantly improves the browser when it comes to scrolling and general smoothness. At least, that's my experience on my Laptop 1.

[vannilla]

Sites are slow because they are either poorly done or do so much work in background that the whole application hangs.
This same situation actually happens in other browsers too (minus some tinfoil-hattery beyond the scope of this reply) but they hide it with a lot of smoke and mirrors so it doesn't appear to hang even though it would otherwise.
Current-day web development tools are partly to blame for this: while programmers, especially web front end, are notoriously bad at writing "not slow" code, tools and frameworks have accumulated a lot of cruft under the hood that is so hidden below layers and layers of abstractions that nobody can really pinpoint where they can be slimmed down, sped up or anything else along those lines.

[andyprough]

Hey all, I recently got Pale Moon and have been messing around with the customisation. After that, I decided to actually try out the browser.

So you customized it before trying it?

How are we to answer your question without any of the required troubleshooting info or any idea what your customizations involved?

Reddit works fine for me and idle Pale Moon does not cause high CPU usage for me. I guess that's my answer based on the provided info.

[Moonchild]

*shrug* Works for me, with plenty of open tabs after a big research project...

[Massacre]

There are indeed problems when loading reddit (new layout) or youtube, and they are related to JS. As 360chrome shows no problems with them, I guess their JS is just too much Chrome-optimized. No scroll problems, though (it may be related to hardware acceleration on specific setups).