I've been using Firefox Nightly (57) for a while on a 2013 MBP running Sierra. Firefox definitely feels significantly faster than it used to, and the new UI is great.

But this comes at the cost of battery life. I moved back to Chrome because it was constantly chewing CPU.

But Chrome is also guilty of absolutely guzzling battery. I always try other browsers on macOS but in the end keep switching back to Safari because it easily gets me ~2-3h more battery life. This means that on 10h average battery life you'd pay a ~20-33% battery life premium just to run a different browser. At that point, finding replacement Safari extensions is well worth the bother.

What I don't understand: why is it that other browsers don't put battery life before all else? We live in a portable world after all..

>We live in a portable world after all..

Do we? I'd say most people with laptops use them either at home or at work, both places were they can plug in.

The majority is not "Starbucks laptop users" or road warriors.

I mostly use mine on the train during the commute. I'm one of many. At home and work I use desktops.

Mozilla will also want to target their engine at tablets and phones at some point. This is presumably why Samsung committed funding to Servo (IIRC).

A few releases ago Chrome (57?) finally fixed the battery problem and its been fine for me since.

Personally I can't use Safari, as I want my bookmarks/history synced between devices and don't use an iPhone.

I switch to Safari when on battery. But the cost is pretty high - it's the only browser I have on my mac that I find actively unreliable, and the feeble range of available extensions makes it seem crippled compared to Firefox or Chrome

+1 for the significantly improved performance on Firefox on OSX (I'm on a 2015 MBP), not just in the current 57 nightly, but since Firefox 55 came out.

Absolutely stunning improvement in performance!

Great work by team FFx! :D

Yep, switched to FF from Chromium since 54/55 when multi-threaded tabs became default. Don't need to restart once in a while when Chromium has eaten up all the RAM. The extension support is just as good, and some of the labs features are very interesting.

Just ran the tests on my Macbook Pro (mid 2012) running High Sierra:

  Safari TP 11.1 Release 40  - 62.71
  Chrome Canary 63.0.3221.0  - 55.45
  Firefox Dev Edition 57.0b3 - 44.17

Not sure whether this would be borne out on later Macs but this seems to confirm my anecdotal experience on my Mac in the last few days, even since 57 came out.

While we are doing scores, here is Fedora 26, Threadripper 1900X with 32 GB RAM:

    Firefox 55.0.3              - 71.4
    Firefox Dev Edition 57.0b3  - 113
    Chrome 61.0.3163.100        - 136

Firefox still does not use hw acceleration for composition.

These are Browserbench 1 though, I have no idea how to run v2.

+1 for mentioning huge CPU usage by Nightly on Mac.

I've been sending feedbacks for Nightly for a while now, but they don't seem to read them. The two biggest issues are:

1- High CPU usage (which leads to high temperature and shorter battery life) 2- No "Look Up / Define" in right-click menu.

Fix them and I'll switch from Chrome in a blink.

> in a blink Funny even though you probably didn't intent it to be.

I had to switch back to Chrome since Firefox has been almost unusable on mainstream site like Netflix. Can't wait to go back to Firefox as soon as 57 is out!