Mozilla cuts Firefox 70 power consumption on macOS by a factor of three

A Mozilla employee says the latest Firefox Nightly for macOS uses up to three times less power thanks to the switch to a different rendering technique. Since the introduction of Firefox Quantum, the browser’s power consumption has always been quite high.

In the topic on Bugzilla where the issue has been discussed for two years, several users report improvements in battery life. They state that they can use Firefox as their default browser again and that they are very happy with and grateful for the change. They do that in the comments on the tweet from the Mozilla developer.

The gain was made by switching to Core Animation. If you want to get started right away, you can download Firefox 70, but it is a Nightly, or a prealpha. If the gfx.core-animation.enabled setting is true under about:config, then the feature is enabled. The final release of version 70 is scheduled for the end of October. Mozilla introduced the faster Quantum engine in 2017.