An Upcoming Firefox Update Decreases macOS Power Usage by Up to Three Times

George Herman

IT Security Expert

Get a FREE scan to check for problems

Some infections like this virus can regenerate themselves. There is no better way to detect, remediate and prevent malware infection, than to use a professional anti-malware software like SpyHunter. One Application that is capable of solving all MAC problems.

Go to Spyhunter.com

SpyHunter Anti-Malware FREE 15-day trial available.

Yesterday, Mozilla team teased an upcoming update for Firefox on macOS. According to the company, the update will fix Firefox’s battery-draining problem and reduce power usage by up to three times.

The first beneficiaries of the update are Macbook users who can expect longer battery lives while using Firefox web browser.

The increased battery consumption of Firefox has been a problem for Mozilla for years, as well as a black stain on the Firefox Quantum release, which is a revamped, performance-centric version of the older Firefox browser.

Despite the fact that Firefox Quantum has been praised for its increased page loading speed, Macbook users haven’t been so delighted, especially when they’re mobile and have to rely on the notebook’s battery as long as possible.

As reported many times on Reddit [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and on some other blogs, Firefox Quantum on macOS has been quite the battery hog, which makes life difficult for mobile users, who often had to rely on other browsers to avoid battery draining.

However, according to Mozilla engineer Henrik Skupin, Firefox developers have finally made a breakthrough, and believe they fixed Firefox’s power consumption on macOS.

In addition, 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 upcoming fix is expected to launch in the stable version of Firefox this October, alongside the release of Firefox 70.

Currently, Firefox statistics claims that nearly 7% of Firefox’s 100 million monthly active users are running a macOS version. Not all of them may be running on Macbooks, but those who are will probably be interested in giving Firefox another go in the next months, knowing the browser won’t drain their batteries.

Per a Bugzilla entry, at the technical level, Mozilla engineers managed to decrease Firefox’s power consumption by switching browser page rendering operations to Core Animation, the graphics rendering and animation engine which is built into both macOS and iOS.