
Firefox Nightly on macOS: decrease in power usage by a factor of about 3x - sohkamyung
https://twitter.com/whimboo/status/1168437524357898240
======
kace91
I tried it after the comments in a previous HN post
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20850135](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
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
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.

------
mosselman
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?

~~~
Fnoord
> 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.

~~~
mosselman
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!

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

It isn't, but this fix has already been around for a while. I've been using it
for about a week. Back then, I was advised to run Firefox Developer Edition.
I'd rather run that, than Nightlies.

~~~
fernandotakai
according to @whimboo[0], these specific changes will land later this week on
the developer edition.

[0]
[https://twitter.com/whimboo/status/1168476885766082561](https://twitter.com/whimboo/status/1168476885766082561)

~~~
Fnoord
Note the wording: "all of these changes". The first part of the change which
I've been using for a week now, is already in Developer Edition. It has the
largest effect. The most recent change has a small (but noticeable) effect.

FWIW, Nightly just managed to crash my MBP. Which, for the record, is normally
rock stable.

~~~
floatingatoll
Caveat emptor: You are likely to be running with altered config settings, as
indicated by your advice above to others, and it’s occasionally found that
about:config changes are what are causing crashes. Consider unwinding your
changes to provide a more accurate outcome. (I’m not part of Firefox, just
pointing out an especially common expert user self-inflicted issue.)

~~~
Fnoord
Thank you for the heads up. It hasn't crashed ever since (the nature of the
crash made it appear related to using Nightly). I'll be switching back to
Developer Edition ASAP as either b3 or b4 has the same fix.

------
timsayshey
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.

~~~
fnordsensei
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.

------
nusbit
Anyone knows how this compares to chrome?

~~~
Peej255
It's in the link. The decreases in power usage put it on par with Chrome.

~~~
4ad
So, still terrible then?

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

~~~
nicoburns
Yes, compared to Safari. The Safari engineering is very impressive! I think
there is quite a bit more to come on the Firefox side though, so hopefully
they'll close the gap.

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

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rbrbr
That shows how shitty all previous versions where.

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jansan
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.

~~~
MiroF
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.

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

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distances
Probably some US colloquialism? Doesn't make sense to me either, except in the
sense "went down 300%" which obviously wasn't the purpose here.

~~~
abdulmuhaimin
nah, its quite common here even in Southeast Asia

