2y ago

High battery usage on android

I recently noticed that Firefox for me has pretty high battery usage, more than twice of what Connect (Lemmy) has at ~75% the screen time.
Could this be because of extensions? I'm using Dark Reader and uBlock Origin

9 comments

I noticed the same thing. It seems like there's a lot of background battery usage. I switched it from "optimized" or "unrestricted", I don't remember which, to "restricted". I don't use Firefox for any reason I'd want notifications, so I don't need it running in the background at all.
The one downside is that I have the search widget on my phone set to open things up in a private window, which is nice to avoid ending up with 1000 tabs open, but private windows now are not as persistent. Like if I looked up a recipe in a private window, a few minutes later, that window will be gone. I might have to switch the power setting to "optimized" and find a way to reduce background battery usage from within the app
How many tabs do you have open? I have quite a few and it can cause battery to drop a lot. It also occasionally starts using a lot of battery in the background for no apparent reason, which is fixed by just force-quitting the app.
It could also just be that Firefox is inherently more energy intensive than a Lemmy client. Browsers have to handle a lot of stuff to render web pages, while clients for sites just have to send some API calls. I might try using another browser for a few days and see if the battery usage is comparable to Firefox.
- I usually just have 1-2 tabs open, at most 4-5
Dark reader has lost popularity because I think its spyware now, but to the point: uB origin is super light on resources so I do not think so.
- DarkReader is open-source, and on the Firefox recommended extensions list; what are you talking about?
  
  Many "recommended" add-ons have terrible reviews because of some very negative aspect they have. And I am not talking for myself, its just the reviews. The reason I made the comment is to make people aware of it, no criticism behind.
- Spyware? When did that happen?
  
  Yeah I'd like to know this as well as I use DarkReader on all my devices.
  I read in the past that it was hijacking page links but it transpired that people were downloading clones from unofficial sources.
  
  Not sure, but I read comments on the mozilla add-ons site and somewhere else. And I did not see any reason why not to uninstall it since in some sites dark reader was counter productive. Just what I read…

9 comments