Big Sur on Macbook Pro 16"

[OddMacFan]

I have a MacBook Pro 16" which shipped with Catalina. Things were fine up until I installed Big Sur. I did a clean install of Big Sur, twice, with the most recent being a few weeks ago, and have done the update to 11.2.

Most aspects of the system seem to be just as fast as I experienced with Catalina. However, certain things just C-R-A-W-L. For example, Safari has an intolerable delay of 2-3 seconds when opening new windows--even from launch--but not new tabs. The Calculator app can take several seconds to complete even basic calculations. Typing in some applications can exhibit a slight but persistent lag before the text appears. I've done PRAM and SMC resets. As previously stated, I've done two clean installs. The system isn't that old and certainly should be rocket fast for basic tasks, but after weeks of waiting for things to stabilize, the slowness is becoming intolerable. Ironically, I do not notice any of these issues with Big Sur on my work-issued 2017 MacBook Pro 13, with the only difference being that I installed Big Sur as an upgrade and not a clean install on that system.

Has anyone experienced something similar? If so, does anyone know if there a solution, other than rolling back to Catalina?


Thanks!

 

[OddMacFan]

An update to note that I found the problem with the slowness in Safari: Bitwarden. When the Bitwarden extension is disabled, Safari returns to the normal, quick behavior with opening new windows.

Bitwarden is aware of the problem, which apparently relates to Apple changing the API for extensions in Safari 14. The fix from Bitwarden (when the extension is converted to use the WebExtensions API) is apparently expected in early March.

I have no explanation for the Calculator slowness, but I did reinstall Big Sur 11.2.1 and the issue no longer appears to be present.