Please Help! EtreCheck Report Attached Computer too slow. Fan starts even with simple browsing and apps.

I don't see any of the usual culprits in the EtreCheck report. At the time you ran the EtreCheck report, your memory usage was fine even with the 8GB of RAM, but your laptop had only been running an hour so it may not be an accurate accounting unless you encountered the slowness since that last reboot.

Try disconnecting all external devices from the laptop in case one of them is causing a problem.

These 2018-2020 MBAirs with the Intel CPUs are not very good systems since they have an extremely poor cooling system. I suspect you may have a bad Logic Board, but it is hard to say for sure. The best way to confirm it would be to do the following:

• Disconnect all external devices
• Perform an SMC Reset (read the instructions carefully since the process is a bit different for this laptop)
• Perform a PRAM Reset (hold the PRAM Reset for two chime if possible, but these USB-C Macs don't always allow it)
• Perform a DFU firmware Revive to reset the T2 security chip & system firmware
• Perform a clean install of macOS by first erasing the entire physical SSD followed by reinstalling macOS. Do NOT restore/migrate from a backup, do NOT install any apps, and do NOT sign into your AppleID or iCloud. Within Disk Utility you will need to click "View" and select "Show All Devices" before the physical SSD appears on the left pane of Disk Utility. Erase the physical SSD as GUID partition and APFS (top option).

Test the system thoroughly under these conditions to see how it behaves. If you have no issues, then install MS Edge & test some more. If the issue only starts after installing MS Edge, then that may be the problem, otherwise if you encounter the issue under those conditions, then you have confirmed a hardware issue. Personally I don't recommend repairing any USB-C Intel Mac for multiple reasons.....the money spent on repairs is better put towards a replacement laptop.

FYI, web browsing is not a simple task....it can be a very system intensive task due to all the junk many websites load into a browser tab/window. Try comparing your browsing results with Safari and Firefox.

Try running the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are detected. I doubt it will detect any problems.....it rarely does, but it never hurts to try.

To begin, you have only 8 GB of RAM installed. I think a minimum of 16 Gb is needed to run Sonoma efficiently, but most MacBooks cannot be Ram added. Fortunately you have an SSD HD installed which is much faster than older mechanical drives. I see a lot of installed apps. Sometimes installing so many of them can cause some conflicts. I'm going to guess that doing some maintenance steps may be helpful. Give them a try and see what happens.

• Open Disk Utility and run its Repair function until it gives you an ok result.
• Do a restart in the Safe Mode. Press the Shift key on restart. This can take a while while the OS is doing internal repair and cleaning it caches. Then restart normally. It is good to do this periodically.
• Periodically restart the computer.
• Periodically clear the browser's history. It takes needed Ram which you don't have much of.
• Finally, keeping multiple apps and windows open can slow down things.

You say that the laptop was fast in the past. Think back to when It got slow. What was installed , done or changed at that time which could have affected this? Something did.

Sometimes freeing up storage can make a difference - if it is too full. Note: you need to keep sufficient vacant storage to download new OS updates and upgrades. Switching browsers should not make a difference. incidentally, you apparently don't back up the computer. Eventually all HDs fail and data will then be lost. I recommend you get an external drive and use Time Machine to do backups. You can use a lower cost mechanical drive for this purpose.

Sorry, the report is not attached for us to review.