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Comment by ayberk | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure what's wrong, but I've been underwhelmed with my 14" MBP's battery life.

I was super excited to get one for work solely because of all the buzz about battery life. But here I'm getting 5 hours or so. Firefox and Chrome are by far the biggest offenders, but I don't do anything special.

Just wanted to give another anecdote.

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Try with Safari and install an ad-blocker, both firefox and chrome keeps letting ads continue to animate (GPU) and use WebWorkers in the background, Safari basically freezes tabs that are not in use and don't drain the battery.

I try to use Safari as much as possible, but I need something that works on Windows as well.

Firefox with uBO [0] and Auto Tab Discard [1] is pretty good on the battery. I often go 10h without a charge on my M1 Air and usually there's still a bit to spare.

[0] https://ublockorigin.com/ [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

Thanks for the recommendations, but I have both and some more. I wish there were an easy way to drill down on what exactly is consuming power.

Have you looked into the about:performance page? It might give you clues.

I have, but nothing stood out. I even tried Firefox Profiler (which is pretty good btw, kudos to the team), and it looks like DOM processing and renderer both spend a lot of CPU. But alas I'm not a frontend developer and have no incentive to dive deeper :)

It could be specific websites. Google web apps are notoriously hostile to Firefox.

I leave Javascript off by default on uBO and only allow it selectively when I have something to gain on each website.

I doubt it’s the only issue, but I switched to Safari for most things years ago, back when I had an Intel Mac. It significantly extended my battery life.

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