Upcoming Firefox update will decrease power usage on macOS by up to three times

[steven36]

Two years after Firefox Quantum's release, Mozilla devs said they fixed Firefox's battery-draining problem.

 

 

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.

 

Source

[steven36]

Firefox 69 ratchets up tracking protection, switching it on by default

 

 

Also, battery help on Macs and a speed boost on Windows.

 

Mozilla has switched on Firefox's tracking protection feature for everyone on Windows and Android, dialing up its effort to protect privacy from website publishers and advertisers that would like to keep tabs on your online behavior. Mozilla enabled tracking protection for new Firefox users in June, but now it's on for everyone, the nonprofit said Tuesday.

Tracking protection is all the rage among browser makers, including Apple's Safari, Brave Software's Brave and Microsoft's new Chromium-based Edge. Even Google's Chrome, long the laggard among major browsers, is starting to tackle the problem. It's a thorny issue for websites and advertisers that seek to improve advertising revenue by targeting ads based on their assessment of your interests.

"Currently over 20% of Firefox users have Enhanced Tracking Protection on. With today's release, we expect to provide protection for 100% of ours users by default," Mozilla said in a blog post Tuesday.

 

Firefox is at a crossroads. It remains widely used on personal computers, but it's a rarity on smartphones, and Chrome is vastly more popular overall. Mozilla Chief Executive Chris Beard will resign at the end of the year, too.

 

But Mozilla's renewed privacy push is arriving at the same time that many in the tech industry and beyond are taking more active measures to reign in sites, apps and services that hoover up our personal info. Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg -- arguably the single greatest financial beneficiary of online tracking -- says he's on board, declaring in April, "The future is private."

Firefox has different degrees of anti-tracking technology. If you turn it all the way up to "strict," it'll try to stop website scripts that try to identify you through digital fingerprinting methods. Later, Mozilla plans to activate that feature by default, too, it said.

Firefox gets some battery and performance help

Also with Firefox 69, Mozilla is trying to give its browser a speed boost on Windows. The browser shares a little information with Windows about what's important -- the tab you're using, for example -- so the operating system can devote more processor power to that and save power on background or other lower-priority tabs, the Firefox 69 beta release notes said.

 

And on MacOS, Firefox 69 also tries to cut down power usage on higher-end MacOS machines with dual graphics chips by using the more battery-friendly option when possible.

 

For the later Firefox 70, you could see more power savings, too, as Firefox taps into some MacOS built-in software for rendering text and imagery on the screen. It's a "huge decrease" in power usage, Mozilla engineer Henrik Skupin tweeted Sunday, and could make Firefox more competitive with Chrome.

 

Source

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