Firefox Nightly on macOS: decrease in power usage by a factor of about 3x

https://twitter.com/whimboo/status/1168437524357898240

by sohkamyung • 7 years ago

230 50 7 years ago

twitter.com

nusbit• 7 years ago

Anyone knows how this compares to chrome?

Vinz_• 7 years ago

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1429522#c45 Linked in the Twitter thread.

Peej255• 7 years ago

It's in the link. The decreases in power usage put it on par with Chrome.

4ad• 7 years ago

So, still terrible then?

The reason I use Safari is because Chrome is unbelievably power-hungry. I didn't know Firefox was even worse.

mosselman3• 7 years ago

Does this also solve the 100% cpu usage on retina screens and the complete locking of macOS every now and then?

How long does nightly stuff usually take to get into the final release?

reustle• 7 years ago

Have any details? I have a retina screen and don't have any CPU usage issues.

spiderfarmer• 7 years ago

There are many bugreports known to Mozilla already. Here's mine: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1407536

JD557• 7 years ago

AFAIK, it's a known issue with retina screens and scaled resolutions. If you use the default resolution, you should not see any issue.

wtallis• 7 years ago

The Firefox release schedule is pretty fast. This stuff should be in the beta release due out today, and the stable Firefox 70 release due out October 22.

mosselman3• 7 years ago

Thanks!

Fnoord4• 7 years ago

How long does nightly stuff usually take to get into the final release?

You can try it out now. Open a terminal:

$ brew cask install firefox-developer-edition

$ cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles

$ ls -l

(Determine which directory is your current profile directory. It should be recently modified and end with .default-release. $ cp -R this directory to .dev-edition-default and start Firefox Developer Edition.)

Then in about:config put gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true.

I have to say that with a lot of tabs Tree Tab Style is still taking up a lot of cycles. Up to the point it (nearly) hangs. At such point, I switch to Sideberry which does not, use OneTab, and start from there. Perhaps setting browser.tabs.20FpsThrobber to true solves this. Trying that out now.

mosselman3• 7 years ago

Firefox Developer Edition is not the same as nightly from what I understand.

Setting gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true makes firefox unusable as alerts aren't readable (might be theme dependent).

The only setting that you need to get FF to work on macos with a retina screen is the 'low resolution' mode trick. But then all text, etc isn't as smooth.

I am now running some tests with the new nightly, so far it seems like it fixes the issues and I am very excited about this!

chenzhekl• 7 years ago

For anyone interested, here is the firefox release calendar: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar

pygy_• 7 years ago

FWIW, I get the CPU clobbered on a non-retina MacBook air, whereas FF works flawlessly on a retina one.

johnsea• 7 years ago

same here

rndgermandude• 7 years ago

Never had this problem. At worst some pages manage to spin up my fans.

jansan2• 7 years ago

What the hell does "decrease by factor 3x" mean? Did power usage previously decrease by 1% and now by 3%? Is power usage now -200%? Seriously, I do not get it.

umvi• 7 years ago

I think what they are saying is: "Current stable Firefox release uses N battery power. The nightly build will use a third as much (N/3) by comparison"

MiroF2• 7 years ago

Honestly there nothing ambiguous about it so I don't get why you were confused.

Take the current power, divide by 3, that is the new usage.

jansan2• 7 years ago

So decreasing by 3 is the same as decreasing by 66%?

deftturtle• 7 years ago

When people say 3 fold, they mean 3 times. I think fold should mean 2^3. When you fold a piece of paper, it doubles each time.

So on the news when they talk about a 10 fold increase, I know they mean 10 times and not 1024 times.

Does anyone else here feel the same, or is fold just another confusing colloquialism?

phonon• 7 years ago

To one-third the original.

fnordsensei2• 7 years ago

If a is 3b, then b must be 1/3a. I’m reading it as cutting 2/3 of the power requirement.

timsayshey• 7 years ago

Just installed it. And had gmail running on it and Chrome at the same time. Firefox Nightly showed to be using significant power while Chrome was not. I think this still has a long way to go before I switch to Firefox both in terms of performance and dev tools.

fnordsensei2• 7 years ago

You're not the first to complain about the performance of Google property in non-Google browsers.

I'm not sure why it should be, or what it implies, but I've seen more than one person pointing out the difference.

Not being a Google user, I'm quite happy with the current Firefox performance, and delighted that Mozilla is finding even more room to improve.

givinguflac• 7 years ago

“Web service designed to crush batteries when used outside of chrome uses a lot of power still.” Film at eleven.

torben-friis• 7 years ago

I tried it after the comments in a previous HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20850135).

My results were very positive when idle (I can finally start FF and have it in the background without fans blasting).

However, just scrolling up and down in the default mozilla website increases power usage brutally (macOs activity monitor showed the energy impact as 200).

I'm still glad to see that fixes are finally coming, even though it's not usable for me yet.

If we get to a point of having it fixed and being able to use webrenderer on macbooks to have the gpu drawing, it could be a 180 for firefox's usability on macOs

I would really like an ETA for the rest of the changes.

Angostura• 7 years ago

Odd, I've just tried with Current FF and I can't get usage scrolling up and down that page to get above 6.3%

iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013)

aylmao• 7 years ago

I wonder if this discrepancy could have something to do with switching to discrete graphics or something along those lines. iMacs can run their graphics card always and are designed to take that noise into account. If OP has a laptop, he might be hearing the graphics card revving up after being idle.

MayeulC• 7 years ago

How does the situation compare to other platforms? Android, Linux, Windows?

rbrbr• 7 years ago

That shows how shitty all previous versions where.

Firefox Nightly on macOS: decrease in power usage by a factor of about 3x

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