Firefox in Mountain Lion is draining my battery.
Hi. I've recently performed a clean install of Mountain Lion in my MBP. I noticed a quick degradation in my battery time and started to verify if it was due to some application. Sadly I noticed that FF 18 was causing that drainage. I switched to Safari 6 and immediately saw the impact on my battery estimated time. Final note: on both browsers I have installed plugins to stop flash animations from playing automatically and to block unwanted ads.
Has any one noticed the same behavior?
Thanks. Pedro
Chosen solution
by cor-elYes, you can give a new profile a try if you can't find a cause in your current profile folder.
Read this answer in context 0Additional System Details
Installed Plug-ins
- Shockwave Flash 11.4 r402
- iTunes Detector Plug-in
- Adobe Shockwave for Director Netscape plug-in, version 11.6.8.638
- Microsoft Lync 2010 Meeting Join Plug-in
- Next Generation Java Plug-in 10.9.2 for Mozilla browsers
- Google Update
- The QuickTime Plugin allows you to view a wide variety of multimedia content in Web pages. For more information, visit the QuickTime Web site.
- NPRuntime Script Plug-in Library for Java(TM) Deploy
- Adobe Shockwave for Director Netscape plug-in, version 11.6.6.636
- Adobe PDF Plug-In For Firefox and Netscape 10.1.4
- ActiveTouch General Plugin Container Version 105
- 5.1.10411.0
- DivX Plus Web Player version 2.2.0.52
- Adobe Shockwave for Director Netscape plug-in, version 11.6.3.633
- DivX VOD Helper Plug-in
- NPWLPG
- The plug-in allows you to open and edit files using Microsoft Office applications
- Office Authorization plug-in for NPAPI browsers
- np-mswmp
Application
- User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0
More Information
Hi!
Have you compared the memory and processor consumption of both browsers? Maybe it's some add-on consuming more cycles than it should? Are you comparing them with the same amount of tabs and similar pages opened?
I'm using the same configuration as you do and I haven't noticed a particular degradation in the battery life.
Best, Ibai
Try to disable hardware acceleration in Firefox.
- Firefox > Preferences > Advanced > General > Browsing: "Use hardware acceleration when available"
- https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Troubleshooting+extensions+and+themes
Create a new profile as a test to check if your current profile is causing the problems.
See "Creating a profile":
- https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profile-manager-create-and-remove-firefox-profiles
- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Standard_diagnostic_-_Firefox#Profile_issues
If the new profile works then you can transfer some files from an existing profile to the new profile, but be careful not to copy corrupted files.
Question owner
Hi. So, I tried turning off hardware acceleration and took a look at Activity Monitor. Firefox with only 1 tab with google search, same for Safari 6. CPU for FF 0,5% for Safari 0%. Threads: FF 28, Safari 18. Strange behaviour for a simple tab with google.com, right. Not to mention the RAM utilisation where Safari shows 175MB and FF 320MB. Should I try the profile test mentioned above? Thanks.
Chosen Solution
Yes, you can give a new profile a try if you can't find a cause in your current profile folder.
Question owner
I tried the reset firefox option and apparently battery consumption seems normal. Thanks to everybody who helped.