I tried to use it for years as my "personal" browser while Chrome was for work. It would regularly cause the system as a whole to be slow when video (Twitch/Netflix) was playing. Switched to Vivaldi for personal and everything works smoothly so far.
What would what accomplished? Moving off of Chrome to a different Chromium based browser?
Presumably I would retain all the high quality that I enjoy from Chrome while avoiding Googles spyware services. Edge, Brave and others remove them. In the case of Brave I believe I would also get some decent adblocking without having to worry about what Googles eventual Manifest v3 enforcement will do to uBlock Origin.
I think it's quite important to state the OS you're using. All Browsers tend to fly on Windows, except for ironically MS browsers. Safari tends to be fastest on MacOS. Basically every mainstream browser sucks in performance, memory usage, cpu, battery usage and so on, on Linux distros, comparatively to the former.
Can't edit anymore, but you're absolutely right. This is on OSX. Safari is a gem, and I used it as my daily driver for 2 years. I switched to Chrome for work stuff because there are no equivalent necessary Safari extensions for some of the tools I use. Not sure why I didn't stay on Safari for personal.
I have approximately the same Macbook (but from 2015), one issue i have is playing 4K .webm videos on Youtube. It doesn't matter which browser, it even happens when i download the video and play it in another player. My CPU will spike and the fans start blasting.
4K videos in mkv/H.264 format i can play fine though.
The issue here is the hardware decoders capability;
Depending on which browser you use, and whether your Macbook is connected to power, websites will send you a different video/codec/size.
It works fine in another browser. So I don't think it is a hardware issue? Is there a situation where Chrome/Vivaldi would be able to use hardware the FF wouldn't? And 90% of my time is spent on power (top left usb-c port).
I really wanted to like it, and the adblock story was good, but it did something wrong with some async js code, and sites like reddit would stop the world to wait until some tracker would time out (likely due to the adblock). This was a poor experience, to say the least.
The new 'trim referrer by default' in Firefox 87 [1] was already enabled in private mode only, some months/weeks ago. So maybe they will make it default everywhere after some weeks? Maybe after working out any kinks?
https://neon.kde.org/