I don't know what version of Firefox this is, but the version I use is so slooooow using Gmail. It takes close to a minute to finish loading if I refresh the screen, compared to seconds with Chrome.
I use Firefox for nearly everything, but I need to keep a Chrome window open because Gmail and Google Meet will max out my CPU and barely work in Firefox. Google properties are literally the only sites where I experience this issue.
Does anybody know technical details about why this is the case? The anti-competitive incentives for them doing this are obvious, but I imagine that there must be some technical explanation that makes for a plausible excuse. Something like them using Chrome only APIs with slow polyfills on other browsers?
For what it's worth, you can add YouTube to the list of Google sites with CPU consuming bugs - particularly in dark mode.
I'm not sure whether Chrome entirely fixes it, but if you watch YouTube in dark mode, there was a UI upgrade that they added that puts a "glow" behind the YouTube video player.
It's intended to look like a light strip behind your TV (but to me, I originally thought there was just something wrong with the monitor or my eyes), but in reality it's just more Canvas/GPU bound calculations running at 60fps constantly which would cause the CPU/GPU in the laptop to pull tens of watts, killing battery life.
There is no way to turn this "feature" off, other than disabling dark mode or blocking the "effects (do not remember exact item name)" DOM item in uBlock Origin. If you want to replicate this, go to a video on YouTube and use the three dots near the sign in button on the top right to enable the dark theme (may already be enabled). Play a video with bright picture, and after about ten seconds, you should start seeing "stuff" show up under the video as if it was a reflection.
My Gmail loads just fine on my Firefox even on a low-end Intel NUC. On the modern web Gmail isn't that heavy on resources and any modern browser should handle Gmail fine.
EDIT to clarify: Google is known to make sure the web experience breaks for firefox, same story for youtube, so this is not an accident. Don´t use chrome and don´t use gmail if you want to keep the web open.
