Upcoming Firefox update will decrease power usage on macOS by up to three times
TechRepubli
Mozilla teased today an upcoming update for Firefox on macOS that they say will reduce power consumption by a factor of up to three.
The primary beneficiaries of this upcoming update are Macbook users, who can now expect longer battery lives while using Firefox.
Firefox's increased battery consumption has been a problem for Mozilla, and a black stain on the Firefox Quantum release -- a revamped, performance-centric version of the older Firefox browser.
While Firefox Quantum has received praises for its increased page loading speeds, Macbook users haven't been that delighted, especially when they're mobile and have to rely on the notebook's battery as long as possible.
As reported countless of times on Reddit [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], HackerNews and various blogs, Firefox Quantum on macOS has been quite the battery hog, making life difficult for users on the go, who, despite loving Firefox, often had to rely on other browsers to avoid draining their batteries.
But according to Mozilla engineer Henrik Skupin, Firefox devs have finally made a breakthrough, and believe they fixed Firefox's power consumption on macOS.
Skupin said that a current fix for the battery drain issue has been deployed on Firefox Nightly, where it managed to reduce power usage by three times.
The fix is expected to land in the stable version of Firefox in late October 2019, with the release of Firefox 70.
According to Firefox statistics, nearly 7% of Firefox's 100 million monthly active users are running a macOS version. Not all may be running on Macbooks, but those who are will most likely be interested in giving Firefox another go in the coming months, knowing the browser won't eat away at their battery at a much faster pace than Chrome or Safari.
Per a Bugzilla entry, at the technical level, Mozilla engineers managed to cut down Firefox's power consumption by switching browser page rendering operations to Core Animation, the graphics rendering and animation engine that's built into both iOS and macOS. This, according to a series of tests, has put Firefox on par with Chrome, in regards to power usage.