I love Firefox. Really, I do. I can’t live without AdBlock Plus or del.icio.us bookmark support, so Safari is a non-starter. But both Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 use up 50-100% of my Mac’s CPU while idle. This kills the battery on my poor little Powerbook G4 laptop, and also makes it run very hot (ouch).
Today, I discovered an optimized version of Firefox 2.0.0.3 that is specifically compiled for the G4 processor (the site also has versions for G5 and Intel Macs). So far CPU utilization is sticking closer to 1-10%! One hell of an improvement.
Check out http://www.beatnikpad.com/archives/2007/03/29/firefox-2002/
Update 20070603 – here’s a better place to find optimized builds.
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