
Upcoming Firefox update will decrease power usage on macOS by up to three times - n1000
https://www.zdnet.com/article/upcoming-firefox-update-will-decrease-power-usage-on-macos-by-up-to-three-times/
======
tylerchr
> This, according to a series of tests, has put Firefox on par with Chrome, in
> regards to power usage.

So still not awesome, but a round of applause to the team nonetheless. Not a
small achievement.

~~~
philjohn
Whic is odd, as I find FF better than Chrome for energy usage, but still
trailing Safari.

~~~
derefr
The big X-factor is extensions. I think these stats usually measure the
browsers where neither has any extensions installed.

~~~
andy_ppp
And I think Safari Extensions are pretty much non-existent now, so it's
probably never going to be a fair comparison.

~~~
eivarv
They're mostly distributed on the App Store these days. The old distribution
channels are still available, but installation using these trigger a warning.

------
vezycash
Firefox has been my only browser since quantum appeared. However, on my 10inch
2-in-1 tablet with 2gb ram and an Atom Processor, Firefox's performance has
been subpar.

Pages will freeze, tabs become unresponsive. Closing the browser doesn't work.
It remains in process, eating up 70-80% of CPU until I terminate the process
with task manager.

Because of this, I'm back with chromium (Opera and Edge). I thought Firefox 69
would change things but it hasn't.

For touch screen friendliness, all desktop browsers suck at the moment
(Classic edge's basically unusable for me.) Firefox is definitely better than
opera in this regard though. But I want a button to switch to touch mode -
make buttons bigger. No need for AI to guess which mode I'm currently on.

~~~
jchw
Using Firefox on a 2-in-1 indeed leaves things to be desired. When pinch
zooming, it seems to treat the pinching like normal page zooming instead of
having a smooth viewport zoom.

~~~
vezycash
Thought you'd find this useful:

Was really frustrated today. And searched for a way to make firefox a bit more
touch friendly.

1\. Launch Firefox, click on the hamburger menu and navigate to “customise”.
2\. In the customise sub-menu, look out for “Density” settings at the bottom
left of the screen. 3\. Select Touch Density, and tick the option for using
Touch density in Tablet Mode as well.

source: [https://mspoweruser.com/how-to-set-up-firefox-quantums-
inter...](https://mspoweruser.com/how-to-set-up-firefox-quantums-interface-
for-windows-tablets/)

------
kristofferR
Let's hope this marks a care for Firefox on macOS by the developers, it has
been neglected for years now.

I hope proper trackpad support is next.

~~~
goda90
From the bugzilla[0] about Pinch to Zoom last year: "We definitely haven't
forgotten about this, and we are working on it (as other priorities permit)."

[0][https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688990](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=688990)

------
vbezhenar
How does one optimize applications for power usage? Should it avoid using GPU?
Should it run computations in batches?

~~~
roca
The main change in Firefox is to use the system compositor (via CoreAnimation)
to composite components of Firefox windows. Until just recently, Firefox
composited its entire window into a buffer using OpenGL, and then sent that to
the system compositor. Unfortunately, with that method, you have to send the
entire window to the system compositor on every frame (because the APIs are
just limited that way), which uses a lot of power when just one little caret
is blinking, for example. With CoreAnimation you can set things up so that
large chunks of the window that aren't changing never get recomposited.

Unfortunately this change is somewhat invasive, which is why it wasn't done
long ago.

~~~
brians
Long ago? That is what enabled the original Mac GUI in the 1980s. I am having
trouble understanding why anyone would have shipped anything else—what was
missing in the time of earlier Firefox?

~~~
mstange
APIs for partial compositing _in combination with hardware accelerated
compositing_ was the thing that was missing. If you don't use hardware
accelerated compositing, repainting only part of the window, and letting the
system compositor know about those areas, is not a problem. It's only the GPU
acceleration and the lack of convenient APIs that makes this a problem.

Before Firefox got hardware acceleration, so up until Firefox 3.6, we were
using CPU-side painting and sending accurate dirty areas to the windowing
system. With Firefox 4, we added hardware accelerated compositing, which made
scrolling and transform / opacity animations a lot more performant. However,
it also meant that we switched to using OpenGL for the compositor, and macOS
does not expose any APIs for invalidating only parts of an OpenGL context. And
at the time Firefox 4 shipped, "retina" displays were not a thing yet, so the
impact of recompositing the entire window was not apparent. And there was the
pervasive notion that "modern GPUs are fast, fill rate is not a problem". It
was only as pixel count grew and grew that this started becoming problematic.
And it took some amount of research and a lot of surgery to switch Firefox to
an approach that gets OpenGL content to the screen while also allowing for
partial updates of that OpenGL content.

------
Vinnl
Previous:

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20857892](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20857892)

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20864255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20864255)

------
Nr7
I hope this will allow me to finally ditch Chrome on Mac. On Windows I changed
to Firefox when Quantum was released but on my old Macbook Air it has been too
slow to use as my main browser.

~~~
n1000
I am not a huge fan of Safari, but it seems so much more optimised for macOS
that it has become my default regardless. I mean an hour extra battery life is
really nice.

~~~
lethologica
Over the last 5 years I've been slowly shifting into the Apple ecosystem. It
started with a 2015 Macbook Pro which I immediately installed Chrome on
because what the hell even was Safari? Chrome was basically the only browser
in my universe. Then I switched to Firefox but I had so many issues with it.
It was slow and buggy and made my laptop chugg along for some reason. Quantum
was a good step forward, though.

But now I own three Apple devices and have fully made the switch to Safari.
I'm so locked into the Apple eco system now though but it has made my life
many times easier using the browser that's designed by the hardware
manufacturer of all my devices.

~~~
neuronic
After being a long time Linux/Android/Chrome user I got dragged into the Apple
ecosystem as I received a used iPhone 6 as a student back in the day.

For my daily life, this has been a blessing. A lot of the complaints about
Apple that people have (and I used to have as an avid Android user) are
absolutely valid. MacBook Pros are hardly "Pro", missing ports are simply
annoying, weird multi-display handling and breaking butterfly keyboards... all
that is true to some extent.

BUT... at risk of sounding like marketing shill, in general my workflow and
private usage of my Apple devices is a wonderful fresh breeze. 99.8% of the
time things just work and I don't have to install third party drivers and
adjust my fan speed to a Fibonacci percentage so that Ubuntu's WiFi works
after waking the laptop from sleep.

Hell, a large portion of the added cost (at worse specs) compared to Dell or
ThinkPad is completely worth it in order to have an amazing trackpad which is
still miles ahead of any other device.

Maybe I should finally give Safari a serious go as well. I always avoided it
due to its image of a less feature-rich browser.

~~~
infecto
I probably sound like a shill too but while there are definitely many valid
complaints, I still feel like being in the ecosystem makes my life a lot
easier. I don't have to do any hacky workarounds. My favorite one that I
discovered last year was sharing WiFi passwords. I was at my buddies house and
asked for his WiFi password but we both have iPhones and it automatically
asked him to share the WiFi password with me. It was a beautiful experience.

------
neallindsay
Save you a click: They switched to core animation.

~~~
neallindsay
Also, is it journalistic best practice to put the only information that's not
in the headline in the last paragraph of the story? That's the opposite of
what I learned in school.

~~~
mfer
For ad revenue they optimize around time on the page. Putting the key
information at the end is becoming a more common practice.

------
gnicholas
I would love to be back on FF, which was my daily driver for most of the last
two decades. I had high hopes for Quantum, but I didn't love it. When I heard
that Brave had switched to Chromium (and supports most Chrome extensions), I
tried it and haven't looked back.

I will try this new version of FF, and I hope it can win me back. Tree Style
Tabs is unparalleled, and I've yet to find a Chromium-compatible version that
works as well (currently using Sidewise, but don't like that it's in a
separate window).

But Brave is so darn fast, I will not be surprised if FF doesn't win me back.
Glad they're improving though, and at the very least pushing the whole field
forward!

------
sokoloff
Presumably it reduces power usage by up to 2/3rds, not 3x. (You won’t be using
Firefox to charge your MacBook.)

~~~
Heliosmaster
Having it decrease by 3x is the same as dividing by 3...

~~~
sokoloff
If the reference power level was 30W (purely to make the math easy to do), and
the “power _increased_ by three times” what would the new power level be? 50W,
90W, or 120W?

If 120W, then why is a “decrease by three times” different?

~~~
stonemasonn
30 * 3 is 90...

30 / 3 is 10.

~~~
sokoloff
Unambiguously true math.

If 30 “increases by three times”, does it become 90 or 120?

If 90, what happens if 30 “increases by 1 times”? Does it stay 30 or become
60?

If 60, then what does 30 “increases by 2 times mean?” Also 60?

~~~
inimino
These things are contextual.

"x increases three times" means 3x to most people. This is different from
"increases by 300%" which usually means 4x. The article says "by a factor of
up to three" in the first sentence but that is too wordy for a headline.

> what happens if 30 “increases by 1 times”?

Nobody would ever say this. We would say it doubled or stayed the same, or
"increased by 100%" perhaps, but never "increased by 1 time".

> 30 “increases by 2 times mean?”

Nobody would ever say this either.

------
SanderSantema
Is this fix already available in the dev version of firefox?

Edit: The improvements are already available on nightly
[https://twitter.com/whimboo/status/1168437524357898240](https://twitter.com/whimboo/status/1168437524357898240)

~~~
Fnoord
The first part of the improvements is the most important one. This is already
included in the Developer Edition as well. Not sure about the second part as
of today.

------
liability
Does anybody know if these changes will benifit users who only have intel GPUs
and non-retina screens?

I can't complain about performance as-is, but even better would still be nice
of course.

~~~
abhinavk
The change for avoiding secondary GPUs as much as possible has already landed
in Firefox 69. This one is about using CoreAnimation.

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Sangeppato
You can also try "pinch to zoom" on the trackpad, enabling the
"apz.allow_zooming" flag

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sorryitstrue
I am suffering silently through using Safari.. might this be the end?

~~~
ansonhoyt
Yes, you've now spoken, making you a vocal sufferer ;-)

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LinuxBender
Will this change be backported to 68.x esr?

~~~
yifanl
I would strongly doubt it, switching out the core graphics driver doesn't seem
like something sensible to push into an ESR release.

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jbverschoor
duplicate

