Brooke Crothers from CNET caught my attention when he wrote about how the popular Firefox web browser has a "longstanding" issue with overtaxing the CPU. This causes small laptops to heat up, he writes. 

While I've never owned a netbook, I am familiar with the problem of high CPU utilization in Firefox. A side effect on top of excessive heat would be that battery life in laptops can get drained very quickly when this happens, which can be problematic.

In fact, this was the precise issue that resulted in me making a switch to Google Chrome sometime last year, a point that Crothers articulated: "That said, Firefox still has a problem in two areas. One, it temporarily spikes at high CPU utilization levels and, two, it gets stuck at a utilization level well above Safari's when tabs are idle." In a nutshell, Crothers says that Firefox hogs the CPU less now, though the issues are not completely gone.

I have no doubt that the Mozilla team would have made substantial inroads to resolve the problem by now. I would love to hear from Firefox users on this though, so please leave a comment.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at CNET News

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