Firefox will improve battery life for MacBook users

macOS users who have been disappointed with the power consumption of Firefox have something to look forward to. Developers say that power usage has been dramatically reduced in the latest nightly build, meaning that when the release goes public, MacBook owners can expect to see a jump in battery life.

There have long been complaints about Firefox Quantum sapping batteries, and now it finally seems as though the problem has been addressed.

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The good news was shared on Twitter by Mozilla engineer Henrik Skupin. He explained that power consumption has been slashed by up to a factor of three, largely thanks to using the native Core Animations rendering engine.

Writing on Twitter, Skupin said:

If you are running @FirefoxNightly on MacOS you will see a huge decrease of its power usage by a factor of about 3x, e.g when loading web pages! It's all about making use of CoreAnimation for rendering now. There is more to come... So don't forget to get the latest Nightly!

— Henrik Skupin (@whimboo) September 2, 2019

For now, only those using the nightly builds of Firefox will see the changes, but reports about the impact on battery life are highly encouraging.

For anyone who wants to stick with stable builds of Mozilla's web browser, it is looking as though you'll have to wait for Firefox 70 to be released, and this is expected to appear towards the end of October.