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It’s great that FF is now faster but how’s battery life in this new engine? The reason I stuck with safari and only a year ago moved to chrome was that google f

It’s great that FF is now faster but how’s battery life in this new engine? The reason I stuck with safari and only a year ago moved to chrome was that google finally was able to drastically improve battery life on chrome for Mac... where is FF here (their release page doesn’t mention “battery” at all), does anyone know?

rcarmo 9y ago
Well, I'm running it on a 7-year-old Mac mini (yeah, no battery, I know, but hold on...), and _idle_ Firefox, without focus, is ticking along at 0.7-1.5% CPU time. Safari is zero. Dead still. I type this and it moves to 0.3%. No idea what Firefox is doing... edit: Also, even without focus, Firefox climbs to 8.9% CPU just by hovering my mouse over it. Safari goes to 0.2%.
- daniel_iversen 9y ago
  Mmm thanks! And looks like there are a few anecdotal reports and bugs around battery drain https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7a91ss/battery_life_on_firefox_quantum/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7a91ss/battery_lif... what a shame if there are issues there - would be a showstopper for my personal usage at least! Hope they haven’t overfocused on speed at the cost of worse battery life.
- tooltalk 9y ago
  Well, I guess that depends on the content of whatever you are viewing. I tried the same on my 5-year old rMacBook Pro: youtube.com: Firefox ~6%, Safari ~0% news.ycombinator.com: 0%, ~0% amazon.com: ~2%, ~2%
- amirmansour 9y ago
  I'm on one of the latest MacBook Pros and Firefox uses more CPU, RAM, and energy than Safari. I don't mind the extra CPU and RAM usage, but the energy usage needs some work, specially during idle time. On average the energy impact of the new Firefox has been double that of Safari.
richdougherty 9y ago
Kind of a related question... if I'm a developer and I want my software to be mobile friendly, what should I do and how should I test it? Are there any reasonable proxies for battery usage that I can run during continuous integration? E.g. measure CPU usage while running tests, measure CPU wakes (somehow?), measure memory bandwidth or IO used? How would I do this?

rcarmo 9y ago

Well, I'm running it on a 7-year-old Mac mini (yeah, no battery, I know, but hold on...), and _idle_ Firefox, without focus, is ticking along at 0.7-1.5% CPU time. Safari is zero. Dead still. I type this and it moves to 0.3%. No idea what Firefox is doing... edit: Also, even without focus, Firefox climbs to 8.9% CPU just by hovering my mouse over it. Safari goes to 0.2%.

daniel_iversen 9y ago
Mmm thanks! And looks like there are a few anecdotal reports and bugs around battery drain https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7a91ss/battery_life_on_firefox_quantum/ https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7a91ss/battery_lif... what a shame if there are issues there - would be a showstopper for my personal usage at least! Hope they haven’t overfocused on speed at the cost of worse battery life.
tooltalk 9y ago
Well, I guess that depends on the content of whatever you are viewing. I tried the same on my 5-year old rMacBook Pro: youtube.com: Firefox ~6%, Safari ~0% news.ycombinator.com: 0%, ~0% amazon.com: ~2%, ~2%
amirmansour 9y ago
I'm on one of the latest MacBook Pros and Firefox uses more CPU, RAM, and energy than Safari. I don't mind the extra CPU and RAM usage, but the energy usage needs some work, specially during idle time. On average the energy impact of the new Firefox has been double that of Safari.

richdougherty 9y ago

Kind of a related question... if I'm a developer and I want my software to be mobile friendly, what should I do and how should I test it? Are there any reasonable proxies for battery usage that I can run during continuous integration? E.g. measure CPU usage while running tests, measure CPU wakes (somehow?), measure memory bandwidth or IO used? How would I do this?