Palemoon OSX Performance

Discussions for the Apple Mac OS builds of Pale Moon

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The old Mac OS versions of Pale Moon were provided by various people and not official or in any way organized. Please make sure you check the date of topic threads to know if the topic is current or relevant! We are using this board for both old discussions and new development of Pale Moon on Mac.

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PhilipLewis
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Palemoon OSX Performance

Unread post by PhilipLewis » 2017-11-24, 10:37

Hi folks,

Disclaimers:
  • I used to benchmark stuff for a living. I know the pitfalls and all the rest, so please no lectures please.
    I use PM because I prefer the "old school" look and status bar etc. to the "FF I wanna be Chrome" look.
    I keep Safari pristine on my Mac for those pesky websites that don't work correctly with various addons installed or because PM issues.
Question:

Has anyone tried to run any benchmarks Palemoon OSX versus FF, Chrome and/or Safari? I used a few minutes on a few random benchmarking suites websites, and the results were less than encouraging :(

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Re: Palemoon OSX Performance

Unread post by SpockFan02 » 2017-11-25, 02:44

I haven't spent a lot of time benchmarking, but it runs fine when I'm using it, and I value add-on support, a nice UI, and not Google over slightly faster page loading. I don't mean to lecture, but why be discouraged by a lower benchmark score if it works well (among other good traits)?

FineWine

Re: Palemoon OSX Performance

Unread post by FineWine » 2017-11-25, 05:59

Though I have been following the Palemoon forums and did have it installed it was too flaky for me. I am still running FF56.0.2 but am playing around with FFQ57.0 using CSS and have just about got it to the way I want and am used too. e.g. Tabs on bottom, Bookmark Favicons on top centre over text on Personal Bookmark bar and typographical changes to Tabs + colourful tabs. This is thanks to Aris of Classic Theme Restorer (CTR) fame 'Classic' css tweaks for Firefox 57+ and Legacy add-ons like CTR will stop working when Mozillas XUL/XPCOM support ends with Firefox 57

I have also been playing with Waterfox 55.2.2 which is very good except 1Password has not signed it yet (1Password extension doesn't work in Waterfox 55.2.2) for more concerning that.

But well done to those who are trying to get Palemoon up going.

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Re: Palemoon OSX Performance

Unread post by PhilipLewis » 2017-11-25, 07:08

SpockMan02 wrote:I haven't spent a lot of time benchmarking, but it runs fine when I'm using it, and I value add-on support, a nice UI, and not Google over slightly faster page loading. I don't mean to lecture, but why be discouraged by a lower benchmark score if it works well (among other good traits)?
Well, you are lecturing, and I asked specifically for folks to abstain from that. I didn't write that the benchmarks were "lower", I wrote "less than encouraging", which also covers crash and do not run. It doesn't "work well" on OSX, thus this post.

Disclaimer: I have developed and benchmarked a lot of software over the past 35 years. I used to care about milliseconds for a living. So, again, this is not a discussion of benchmarking per se.

PM on OSX appears visually sluggish in the real world (there can be many reasons for this), and the benchmarks that do run, suggest that this visual observation is accurate. Some of them don't even run, suggesting compatibility issues, and yes, some are quite slow relative to Safari (I tested FF previously, but FF is now problematic to benchmark now due to the "slow" detection (not even sure it can be disabled)).

PM, at least on Win, used to be a snappy performer relative to its competitors (PM came with me to the Mac when I quit working on Win machines). The OSX version appears to be suboptimal - YMMV - try taking a trip and reporting your experience.

HarmonicResonance

Re: Palemoon OSX Performance

Unread post by HarmonicResonance » 2017-11-26, 23:25

In my experience, PM works well on OS X. If it doesn't work for you, then let's discuss specifics and generate some solutions. E.g. which benchmarks? What compatibility is missing?

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Re: Palemoon OSX Performance

Unread post by SpockFan02 » 2017-11-27, 02:57

PhilipLewis wrote:YMMV
Yeah, it really works quite well for me. I have not experienced the sluggishness that you describe. I'm not an expert as you seem to be, but could there be something about the way you're set up that would detract from performance? Memory allocation, a bug in your particular build, or something like that?

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Re: Palemoon OSX Performance

Unread post by Moonchild » 2017-11-27, 17:34

Don't forget that Pale Moon on OSX is experimental/a work-in-progress, and not official for a reason... YMMV is the expected state.
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sugis

Re: Palemoon OSX Performance

Unread post by sugis » 2017-11-28, 00:26

I've found myself that most slowdowns are related to extremely heavy JavaScript usage. For example, a log tailer that tries to load a 500MB document causes the entire browser to hang for multiple seconds at a time.
(You could easily argue that the log tailer is broken, but the fact is Chrome et al at least don't hang the entire browser).

Are you running any heavy JavaScript? Or maybe some evil adware is injecting a Bitcoin miner into your site? (Only half joking...)

If you're interested in tracking this down, it would be interesting to grab some profiling data (I haven't profiled Mac in forever, so forgive me for not knowing the best tool) -- highlighting the hot spots you see would give us a shot at understanding the problem.

I personally find the browser is good enough for everyday use, but I agree that occasionally some sites tend to slow the browser down dramatically. I'm not sure if this behavior is Mac specific, for example I was able to reproduce my "log tailer" example above just fine on linux PM as well.

To me, a "I visit this site and PM is too slow and here's the profile showing why" is much more valuable than "PM is 32% slower in JS benchmark Foo than FF".

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Re: Palemoon OSX Performance

Unread post by PhilipLewis » 2018-02-08, 07:27

I haven't had time to return to this thoroughly.
It would be nice if there were some tool to track CPU usage by add-on - a forlorn hope I know.

What I noticed today though (v27.7.2), is that the https://palemoon.start.me/start page adds another 25% CPU usage to the total. This seems bizarre.
(I note that the start.me homepage itself is also rather CPU intensive)
Screen Shot 2018-02-08 at 14.17.02.png
For comparison purposes, I opened https://palemoon.start.me/start in a fresh FF session. The result was even uglier!
Screen Shot 2018-02-08 at 14.17.02.png
Attachments
Screen Shot 2018-02-08 at 14.30.20.png
Last edited by PhilipLewis on 2018-02-08, 07:33, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Palemoon OSX Performance

Unread post by 137ben » 2018-02-16, 00:46

I semi-regularly run Pale Moon through a bunch of benchmarks (along with Firefox, Chromium, Edge, and WebkitGTK/GNOME). I do this purely for my own amusement, since all browsers are fast enough on my hardware. Sometimes Pale Moon beats Firefox, other times it loses. However, there are only two benchmarks I know of on which Pale Moon fails to complete them at all: Apple's ARES 6 (http://browserbench.org/ARES-6/) and Google's Web Tooling Benchmark (https://v8.github.io/web-tooling-benchmark/). On all the other benchmarks in my lineup (which totals 23 benchmarks), Pale Moon runs and returns a score, albeit usually a worse score than Chromium.

However, I am only testing Pale Moon (and other browsers) on Linux and Windows, since I don't have a Mac. So, maybe it's possible that Pale Moon for MacOS is missing features that other PM builds have which causes it to fail to run some benchmarks?
Last edited by 137ben on 2018-02-16, 00:49, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Palemoon OSX Performance

Unread post by Moonchild » 2018-02-17, 08:54

ARES-6 measures the execution time of JavaScript's newest features.
This means it specifically tests the edge-case features Pale Moon likely does not have full support for (yet). No surprise it doesn't complete because nobody does feature detection properly ;) -- it also seems to be assuming certain things are present (like ES6 classes, in the Driver module "borrowed" from Apple) and won't even start as a result.
Last edited by Moonchild on 2018-02-17, 08:58, edited 2 times in total.
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