2038287 - Thunderbird donation page consumes massive CPU/GPU due to animation

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 2007785

(Core :: Graphics: WebRender, defect)

Description

[Niklas Hambüchen]

Attachment: Screenshot from 2026-05-08 18-35-48.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:149.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/149.0

Steps to reproduce:

I noticed that my desktop computer (on Linux, i3 window manager) consumed a permanent 25% GPU and 20% GPU utilisation permanently, spinning the fans, and 60 W more than usual on idle.

The culprit was Thunderbird's "Keep Thunderbird alive" page that popped up by itself in a new tab.

It has a full-page animated colour background, and an animated badge in the "Donate" button.

Thunderbird 140.9.1esr on Ubuntu 24.04

Actual results:

Massive CPU+GPU load.

Expected results:

Thunderbird does not create massive load with the donation page.

Please remove the animation of the donation page, or make it animate only when the Thunderbird window is focused, or once on open, not permanently for hours/days on an unfocused window.

Thunderbird is an email program that many people keep permanently on, in the background.

It should not consume 25% of my computer resources, making it feel sluggish and miserable.

Comment 1

[Niklas Hambüchen]

Another frustrating thing:

We've had the "Progress bar causes high CPU usage" for 13 years, and it was finally fixed recently bug 854093.

So now the new donation page does the same thing.

How can we propagate across Thunderbird developers that permanent animation is not a good idea?

Comment 2

[Niklas Hambüchen]

This is the animated page it loads:

https://updates.thunderbird.net/en-GB/thunderbird/140.0/apr26-2e/?utm_content=apr26-2e&utm_source=in_app&utm_medium=desktop&utm_campaign=apr26_appeal

Comment 3

[Niklas Hambüchen]

Attachment: thunderbird-animated-donation-page.mp4

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Niklas, thanks for the bug report. I remember looking at this prior to your bug report, in bug 958931.

Does the high CPU continue with status bar disabled?

Comment 5

[Niklas Hambüchen]

Hi Wayne, I don't fully understand the question. The page is showing a full-page animated background. Irrespective of the status bar, that necessarily will consume CPU.

It also consumes high CPU in Firefox, which has no status bar.

Is the solution not obviously to remove the animation?

Comment 7

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Niklas Hambüchen from comment #1)

...
How can we propagate across Thunderbird developers that permanent animation is not a good idea?

Permanent animation is not the problem - it is the excessive resource usage that is a problem.

Hi Wayne, I don't fully understand the question. The page is showing a full-page animated background. Irrespective of the status bar, that necessarily will consume CPU.

Thanks. I suspected the answer would be the status bar is not involved - and that is what we needed to know.

Comment 8

[Melissa A [:melissa_a]]

Hey there,

Thanks for the report. I've cut a ticket on the website repo that should resolve any background cpu issues. You can follow the progress there if you'd like.

https://github.com/thunderbird/thunderbird-website/issues/1266

Cheers,
Mel