Vivaldi is too heavy. Way more threads than Safari. Drains battery
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Vivaldi is a great browser from a great company. I use it on Android, Mac and Linux. One complaint I have on Mac (and Linux) is that it simply runs WAY too many processes/threads and as a result chows through battery.
On Mac when using Safari or Firefox usage is much lower. Same on Linux - using Firefox i's hardly using CPU or threads and never eats my battery nor starts up the fans. However Vivaldi always uses more CPU and threads, chowing through battery.
On most video sites, Firefox and Safari will easily play videos all day with low CPU but Vivaldi on Mac and Linux will have the fans spinning up after a few minutes.
Attached is a screenshot of Activity Monitor with both Safari and Vivaldi open on google.com doing nothing else. Both have Bitwarden extensions but that's it.
As you can see Vivaldi has WAY too many threads open vs Safari and uses half the CPU.
This may be a chrome engine issue, in which case I highly recommend you guys move to Gecko engine or Webkit.
thanks
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@danielfgom I completely agree. I mean it's just great having stacked tabs. It really is. But the price to pay for this is just too high. I'm having weird issues with my battery now. I'm not going to blame it on Vivaldi, but it's hard to rule out if the monstrous battery consumption of Vivaldi is unrelated. I'm very sorry but it seems like I'm going back to Safari. Before Vivaldi, I was using Opera.
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In my experience, Google Chrome has the same problem. Both Vivaldi and Chrome use a lot of CPU and their CPU consumptions are comparable.
This seems to have been a well-known problem for Chrome on Mac:
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/07/12/google-chrome-battery-life/
This article is from July last year. I don't know whether this promised improvement has been implemented or not.
At the moment, the only practical workaround to alleviate the problem seems to be to install an extension that automatically hibernates all inactive tabs.
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Sad to say that I'm also finding it hard to justify using Vivaldi now. I have an Intel-based Mac and whenever the fan is going like crazy I look at the activity monitor and sure enough it is Vivaldi using up all the power.
*Edit: I've started using Firefox more lately and noticed it doesn't seem to have that problem. I still love the features of Vivaldi and want to carry on using it though. Another feature of Firefox that I'd loved to see in Vivaldi is containers, but the performance issues will need to be resolved first.
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An update on the above- I followed the instructions here and resolved the Vivaldi performance issue: https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/install-update/full-reset-of-vivaldi/
One thing I haven't done is set up the e-mail settings so I suspect the bad performance may be related to the e-mail client that's built into Vivaldi. Admittedly I have a lot of unread e-mails in the account so perhaps that's what was causing problems for it. That said, I have no more "fan is going like crazy" issue so I'm happy.
