OS X 10.5.5: CPU pegging with Firefox

Even after five updates it's not clear that 10.5.5 is a better OS for my iMac G5 than 10.4.11. Leopard is probably optimized for the Intel machines, and I suspect the security measures (memory address changes) have their price.

The biggest problem now is it's slow. In particular Firefox routinely pegs the CPU (activity monitor) on 10.5 whereas it didn't on 10.4. The type lag is very annoying. In general it feels about 10% slower for most of what I do.

So if you have a PPC machine on 10.4.11 you might want to wait until you buy a new machine to switch.

Update 9/27/08: I find a few other people noticing this. Some are disabling the memory cache. I'll try the new google toolbar and look for other extensions to remove.

See also:

Gordon's Tech: OS X 10.5 bug 5: archive and install cross-user startup (login) item application: "In the course of updating my MacBook and iMac to 10.5 I've previously documented four significant bugs (though the last may, after some fixes, have limited impact):

* LaunchDaemons: cannot login from admin account
* Permissions - apps cannot be updated
* Keychain First Aid 10.2 running on OS X 10.5
* The unknown user and group bugs

Now I can add a fifth bug [1].

The Archive and Install form of the update process (this or clean install are the only safe choices, both have big issues) applied login items belonging to my wife's user account to my own account. I suspect it applied them to all accounts, but I haven't dug through the rest yet.