macOS coreaudiod high CPU utilization with Firefox or Chrome

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2022-06-22 21:30:06

For weeks the fans in my MacbookPro 15" laptop have been running at full speed, the aluminum case is hot to the touch, and the battery hardly lasts for more then a few hours.

In this example, the plugin-container process is the sandbox environment firefox uses to keep tabs isolated. I started the search here since there were so many containers running.

To narrow down the problem, I started by examining the individual tabs within firefox task manager and noticed that outlook email, outlook calendar, gmail, and google calendar were all using a significant amount of energy. For example:

However, I use these applications throughout the day. They must be running. As a test, I opened all four tabs in safari to see if Apple did a better job with CPU utilization. Spoiler, it does. The coreaudiod process is still zero and the fans no longer run at full speed.

Why not switch to safari exclusively? Firefox and Chrome have better support for ad blocking and some other containerization plugins I use for privacy.

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