Are you sure you want to invoke this logic? Because following it through imagine the energy savings if Firefox users switched to Chrome.
- Switching from Firefox to Chrome might be similar to switching between two car models, one consuming less energy than the other.
- Fixing this bug is more like going to a car workshop to fix an injector issue in your car that was causing higher fuel consumption and more pollutants.
The first one is really a matter of tradeoffs and personal choices. The second one is less of a choice and more of an actual issue that was left due to negligence. Hardly similar.
One could also argue that the OS is the car, the browser is the chauffeur, and the user is the passenger.
Quoting the Mozilla engineer responsible for most of the recent activity on the bug:
"This problem has two sides: Microsoft was doing a lot of useless computations upon each event; and we are generating a lot of events. The combination is explosive. Now that Microsoft has done their part of the job, we need to reduce our dependency to VirtualProtect."
It was also noted elsewhere in the thread that similar, though less severe, CPU impact is seen with other antivirus products.
Microsoft was doing something wrong that made this operation more expensive than it needed to be, but Mozilla is also doing this far more than any other browser.
Ironically, Mac users routinely complain about how power-hungry Chrome is on the Mac. Safari is significantly more efficient.
Based on the increased laptop battery life I notice, so is using Edge on Windows.
It makes sense that both Apple and Microsoft can extract the best out of their OS + browser. There's no way Firefox can compete on such OS specific optimizations.
The new Edge based on Chromium performs better than Chrome with regards to power consumptions.
The old Edge was even better in terms of power consumption. Like a few extra hours of battery life.
Entirely serious question. Apple is known to severely privilege their own applications over competitors.
It’s entirely possible that Safari is intentionally avoiding features that make it wake up-
I doubt that it does anything unavailable to other browsers, thats MS territory, because they wanted features. I feel like safari, by contrast, doesn't want to add features.
IME, Safari is no better than Brave in terms of battery, even when I’ve got hundreds of tabs open.
Besides, there's some precedent set in 1998 by a certain OS that "favored" their embedded browser over the competition, so I doubt Apple would want to tickle that fancy.
https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit
> Most users wouldn’t even notice that their choice to use Safari is responsible for their great battery life.
Seeing that MacOS has called out which apps are using the most energy for years, users can definitely tell which apps are using the most battery life.
But you are free to download the source code, compile and run it yourself to see if it is less battery efficient than the official builds.
If either browser’s manufacturer wants to see what Apple does to make Safari more battery efficient, they are free to look at the source code to WebKit.
I recall some feature I was using that ran in an inferior way to save power on Safari, so much so that I had to kill that feature and use a different API
Google's only incentive to make Chrome more efficient is when they start receiving heat (no pun intended) about bad performance.
> imagine the energy savings if Firefox users switched to Chrome.
Imagine the privacy savings if Chrome users switched to Firefox.
Imagine the energy squandered on all the extra goods and services bought by users using a browser owned by an advertising company, instead of Firefox.
Nah, I like my privacy. How about replacing Electron apps with native apps instead?
i've read everywhere that Firefox at this point is far more energy efficient than Chrome...is that not true?
In seriousness, though, this is an issue. Elsewhere, I observe arguments about eg userbenchmark rankings, and the comparative relevance of single-core vs multicore performance. Are you playing a game, or rendering video 24/7 -- or running some entirely synthetic workload that allows for a peak performance the real world would never achieve? Same kinda problem.
Situation seems to happen some time after visiting ad-heavy sites (yeah I know I should install an ad-blocker). Have others noticed this? Seems to be Chrome. I also use Firefox and occasionally Safari but have not noticed that with those browsers.
The reason it is not “invoked” is because energy prices are sufficiently low (due to not pricing in externalities) that there exists little incentive for end users to optimize for power usage.
You're right in principle, but in practice even factoring in externalities electricity prices won't be high enough for people to care. Using current US carbon intensity for electricity generation[1] and the higher end estimates for the social cost of carbon[2] gets us carbon costs of $0.142 per kWh. The average prices in US is $0.168. Adding in carbon costs would almost double the price, but there are countries with even higher electricity prices[4] and they're not exactly switching to more efficient software in droves to save energy.
[1] https://emissionsindex.org/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cost_of_carbon#Carbon_p...
[3] https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/data/averageenergyprices...
[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-price...
Imagine the power savings if everyone used pihole, ublock etc.
Second uses more power than the first and is better. Do it!
Perhaps a "niche" use case for some, but there's a lot more Firefox users on Linux in particular
1. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/chrome-firefox-edge-ram-compa...
The optimum is likely somewhere where most people use the currently most efficient solution and others keep alternatives alive and competitive.
In switching browsers, you get different features, workflows and functionality, many of which you prefer on Firefox, which is why you’re using it.
With this bug fix, there is absolutely no loss or change in functionality (other than increased battery life), and yet you’re getting the benefits.
This bug is pure waste.
Far worse due to privacy/adblock addons.
This is why I left firefox.
And then imagine Safari on an M1.
Enlighten us.