CPU Performance Debugging using Task Manager (about:performance)

[amitnovick]

Hey folks, I have an idea for a proposal, hopefully it's not too late to get it reviewed 😅

Problem

A modern web browser has many moving parts:

• scripts running in a tab (website scripts, content scripts)
• scripts running in the background (background scripts)
• scripts running in a devtools panel
• other things

When one part consumes too much of the CPU, the current best practice AFAIK is to eliminate possible culprits one by one, by terminating them.

This is a tedious and primitive way of solving CPU-performance-related issues.

Solution

Provide a fine-grained view that displays the consumption of each part (a background extension, a tab, or something else) alongside the Memory column in the Task Manager currently accessed through about:performance.

With this kind of view, it would be much easier for users to identify malfunctioning parts and terminate them efficiently.

Similar solutions:

in Chrome:

in Windows 10:

This solution is borne out of frustrations that I had trying to solve an issue of high CPU spikes on my Firefox desktop, and I would love to be able to improve the state of things by contributing via GSOC!