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High battery usage on android (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I usually just have 1-2 tabs open, at most 4-5

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] -3 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Spyware? When did that happen?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago

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…

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

DarkReader is open-source, and on the Firefox recommended extensions list; what are you talking about?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

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.