Firefox Nightly on macOS: decrease in power usage by a factor of about 3x

Re:Firefox Nightly on macOS: decrease in power usage by a fa... by Fnoord on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @08:18AM (#20865787)

> How long does nightly stuff usually take to get into the final release?

You can try it out now. Open a terminal:

$ brew cask install firefox-developer-edition

$ cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles

$ ls -l

(Determine which directory is your current profile directory. It should be recently modified and end with .default-release. $ cp -R this directory to .dev-edition-default and start Firefox Developer Edition.)

Then in about:config put gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true.

I have to say that with a lot of tabs Tree Tab Style is still taking up a lot of cycles. Up to the point it (nearly) hangs. At such point, I switch to Sideberry which does not, use OneTab, and start from there. Perhaps setting browser.tabs.20FpsThrobber to true solves this. Trying that out now.

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Re:Firefox Nightly on macOS: decrease in power usage by a fa... by mosselman on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @08:44AM (#20865936)

Firefox Developer Edition is not the same as nightly from what I understand.

Setting gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque to true makes firefox unusable as alerts aren't readable (might be theme dependent).

The only setting that you need to get FF to work on macos with a retina screen is the 'low resolution' mode trick. But then all text, etc isn't as smooth.

I am now running some tests with the new nightly, so far it seems like it fixes the issues and I am very excited about this!

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Re:Firefox Nightly on macOS: decrease in power usage by a fa... by Fnoord on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @08:50AM (#20865967)

> Firefox Developer Edition is not the same as nightly from what I understand.

It isn't, but this fix has already been around for a while. I've been using it for about a week. Back then, I was advised to run Firefox Developer Edition. I'd rather run that, than Nightlies.

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Re:Firefox Nightly on macOS: decrease in power usage by a fa... by fernandotakai on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @09:36AM (#20866317)

according to @whimboo[0], these specific changes will land later this week on the developer edition.

[0] https://twitter.com/whimboo/status/1168476885766082561

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Re:Firefox Nightly on macOS: decrease in power usage by a fa... by Fnoord on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @09:54AM (#20866466)

Note the wording: "all of these changes". The first part of the change which I've been using for a week now, is already in Developer Edition. It has the largest effect. The most recent change has a small (but noticeable) effect.

FWIW, Nightly just managed to crash my MBP. Which, for the record, is normally rock stable.

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Re:Firefox Nightly on macOS: decrease in power usage by a fa... by floatingatoll on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @10:51AM (#20867018)

Caveat emptor: You are likely to be running with altered config settings, as indicated by your advice above to others, and it’s occasionally found that about:config changes are what are causing crashes. Consider unwinding your changes to provide a more accurate outcome. (I’m not part of Firefox, just pointing out an especially common expert user self-inflicted issue.)

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Re:Firefox Nightly on macOS: decrease in power usage by a fa... by Fnoord on Wednesday September 04, 2019 @08:52AM (#20876677)

Thank you for the heads up. It hasn't crashed ever since (the nature of the crash made it appear related to using Nightly). I'll be switching back to Developer Edition ASAP as either b3 or b4 has the same fix.

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Re:Firefox Nightly on macOS: decrease in power usage by a fa... by chenzhekl on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @08:51AM (#20865970)

For anyone interested, here is the firefox release calendar: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Release_Management/Calendar

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