Power usage, in Watts, as displayed by Intel Power Gadget. As a result, Firefox 70 drastically reduces the power usage during browsing. This allows us to do less work per frame when only small parts of the screen change. There is definitely still some tracking based on web searches, so there is still plenty of work to be done on that front, but it’s less so than with other browsers.In Firefox 70 we changed how pixels get to the screen on macOS. Overall, after a few months of use, this appears to work pretty well, and while most people will go with the Balanced option, since it arrives as the default, it won’t hinder performance.If that works, use the following steps to remove the website's data from your Mac.I have no idea what it is but Firefox is sluggish, laggy, and overall terrible on all of my macs. To prevent the website from using that data, view the website in a private window: Choose File > New Private Window. A website can store cookies, caches, and other data on your Mac, and issues with that data can affect your use of the website.
How Well Does Firefox Work Download And InstallTo download and install Firefox: Visit the Firefox download page in any browser (for example, Safari). Users have reported much longer battery life, cooler machines and less fan spinning.Installing Firefox on Mac. The larger the Firefox window and the smaller the animation, the bigger the difference. I don't.In short, Firefox 70 improves power usage by 3x or more for many use cases.Charlie SiegelHow is this different from the regular Firefox browser incognito mode or otherwise Do I now have to have 3 browsers (bc you cant uninstall Safari on iOS -).After so many years, I have been able to use Firefox on my Mac – I used to test every Firefox release, and nothing had worked in the past. Thank you, I’m very happy to finally see Core Animation being implemented. Prior to this update I literally couldn’t use Firefox because it would spin my fans way up and slow down my whole computer. I’m seeing a huge improvement over here too (2015 13″ MacBook Pro with scaled resolutions on internal display as well as external 4K display). Note: If you want to have a choice of the language for your Firefox.Step 3: The operating system’s window manager assembles all windows on the screen to produce the screen content.The improvements in Firefox 70 were the result of reducing the work in steps 2 and 3: In both steps, we were doing work for the entire window, even if only a small part of the window was updating.Why was our compositor always redrawing the entire window? The main reason was the lack of convenient APIs on macOS for partial compositing.The Firefox compositor on macOS makes use of hardware acceleration via OpenGL. Step 2: The Firefox “compositor” assembles these Gecko layers to produce the rendering of the window. There are three major steps to getting pixels on the screen: Step 1: Firefox draws pixels into “Gecko layers”. Technical DetailsLet’s take a brief look at how the Firefox compositing pipeline works. AtiensivuRead on for the technical details behind these changes. This makes my 2015 mbp without a dedicated dGPU become a power sipper compared to earlier builds. ![]() The layer tree defines the positions, sizes, and order of the layers within the window. These layers usually contain textures with some pixel content. Enter Core AnimationCore Animation is the name of an Apple framework which lets you create a tree of layers ( CALayer). This turned out to be a problem despite the fact that these draws were fully hardware accelerated. (IOSurface is the macOS API which provides a handle to a GPU buffer that can be shared between processes. Then, when the window manager composites that CALayer onto the screen surface, it will read directly from our GPU buffer with no additional copies. However, it provides a number of other useful capabilities, which are almost as good and in some cases even better.First and foremost, Core Animation lets us share a GPU buffer with the window manager in a way that minimizes copies: We can create an IOSurface and render to it directly using OpenGL by treating it as an offscreen framebuffer, and we can assign that IOSurface to a CALayer. But with Core Animation, we can just group updates from multiple layers into the same CATransaction, and the screen will be updated atomically.Having multiple layers allows us to update just parts of the window: Whenever a layer is mutated in any way, the window manager will redraw an area that includes the bounds of that layer, rather than the bounds of the entire window. There would have been no guarantee that the rendering from the different contexts would end up on the screen at the same time. This was not possible with the old API we were using: Without Core Animation, we would have needed to create multiple NSViews, each with their own NSOpenGLContext, and then call flushBuffer on each context on every frame. Nevertheless, all major browsers on macOS now make use of this API.)Secondly, Core Animation lets us display OpenGL rendering in multiple places within the window at the same time and update it in a synchronized fashion. (Our current compositor does not yet make use of this capability, but future work in WebRender will take advantage of it.) The Firefox Core Animation compositorHow do we make use of those capabilities in Firefox now?The most important change is that Firefox is now in full control of its swap chain. This is great for efficient scrolling. With the old API, if any part of our OpenGL context’s default framebuffer was transparent, we needed to make the entire OpenGL context transparent.Lastly, Core Animation allows us to move rendered content around in the window cheaply. This cuts down the window manager’s work some more for areas of the window that only contain opaque layers. In the new world, Firefox renders to offscreen buffers of its own creation and it knows exactly which pixels of each buffer need to be updated and which pixels still contain valid content. Because of this, we just ignored the framebuffer content and re-rendered the entire buffer. So on every frame, we could guess that the existing framebuffer content was probably two frames old, but we could never know for sure. Uvi torrent macIt also means that the window manager does not need to redraw the vibrancy blur effect unless something in the vibrant part of the window changes.The rendering pipeline in Firefox on macOS now looks as follows:Step 1: Firefox draws pixels into “Gecko layers”.Step 2: For each square CALayer tile in the window, the Firefox compositor combines the relevant Gecko layers to redraw the changed parts of that CALayer.Step 3: The operating system’s window manager assembles all updated windows and CALayers on the screen to produce the screen content.You can use the Quartz Debug app to visualize the improvements in step 3. This saves some more work in step 3. This cuts down on work in step 3.And finally, Firefox windows are additionally split into transparent and opaque parts: Transparent CALayers cover the “vibrant” portions of the window, and opaque layers cover the rest of the window. This change on its own is responsible for most of the power savings.In addition, each Firefox window is now “tiled” into multiple square Core Animation layers whose contents are rendered separately. Matt Woodrow reviewed the vast majority of these patches. AcknowledgementsWe implemented these changes with over 100 patches distributed among 28 bugzilla bugs. This will allow us to ship WebRender on macOS without a power regression. We are targeting WebRender for these further optimizations. Their findings accelerated our research and allowed us to implement the most efficient approach right from the start. Chrome developers (mostly Chris Cameron) had already done the hard work of comparing the power usage of various rendering methods on macOS. And thanks to all the other testers that made sure this change didn’t introduce any bugs, and to everyone who followed along on Bugzilla.During the research phase of this project, the Chrome source code and the public Chrome development notes turned out to be an invaluable resource. Thanks to Firefox contributor Mark, who identified the severity of this problem early on, provided sound evidence, and was very helpful with testing. Notably, partial compositing is enabled in Firefox on Windows for non-WebRender, non-Nvidia systems on reasonably recent versions of Windows, and on all systems where hardware acceleration is off. Firefox uses partial compositing on some platforms and GPU combinations, but not on all of them.
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