Killing battery on new Apple M1 13" MacBook Pro
Has anyone else reported severe battery draining on a new M1 chipped MacBook Pro? I noticed that the battery was draining as quickly or quicker compared with the one in my old 2014 15" MacBook Pro. I checked Activity Monitor and saw that the CPU utilization for the Firefox WebExtensions process was consistently north of 99%, even while I was doing nothing.
I've switched to using Safari and I'm now getting the incredible battery life I expected having read all of the reviews for the new M1 laptop.
I've been using Safari (on battery, with the screen at full brightness) for over an hour now and it hasn't moved from 100% yet.
This morning it went from fully charged to below 20% in less than five hours with brightness at 50% or less for half of that time. I'm sure I can't be the only new MacBook user who has noticed this?
Please fix the problem Mozilla as I'd much prefer to use Firefox vs Safari but not if it kills battery time like this.
Chosen solution
i_a_henderson said
Thank you very much Alice. I'm running Big Sur 11.0.1 on a new Apple Silicon (M1) 13" MacBook Pro. I have no idea why you got the system details you mention but they're not mine. I was running version 83 through Rosetta 2 emulation which probably explains some or all of the problem I was experiencing. I will try again when 84 is released next month.
I got the system details from the right panel by choosing Question Details -> More system details, which says this: User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.0.1 Safari/605.1.15
It must be a bug in the Mozilla Support forum software, detecting macOS Big Sur. I'll change the tag to macOS 11.0.1 Big Sur. In any case, I think that waiting for Firefox 84 to be released is the best choice.
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Your system details show you posted with Safari on an Intel Mac, OS X 10.15.6 which is Catalina. Please confirm your macOS version, whether it is an Intel CPU and what Firefox version is draining your battery.
You mentioned having a new "m1 chipped" Macbook Pro. Is this the new Apple Silicon CPU? See How to download and install Firefox on Mac, which includes the following information: Firefox version 83 and higher support Apple devices with an ARM-based CPU (Apple Silicon). Firefox 83 runs on new Apple Silicon devices by way of Apple's Rosetta 2 emulation software and thus performance speeds may suffer. Later versions of Firefox are expected to run natively.
If this is the case, you could wait for Firefox 84 to be released (around Dec 15 2020) to see if performance improves, or you could try Firefox 84 Beta, which you can download from here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/#product-desktop-beta
Also,in case it helps, see: Firefox uses too much memory or CPU resources - How to fix
Thank you very much Alice.
I'm running Big Sur 11.0.1 on a new Apple Silicon (M1) 13" MacBook Pro. I have no idea why you got the system details you mention but they're not mine.
I was running version 83 through Rosetta 2 emulation which probably explains some or all of the problem I was experiencing. I will try again when 84 is released next month.
Chosen Solution
i_a_henderson said
Thank you very much Alice. I'm running Big Sur 11.0.1 on a new Apple Silicon (M1) 13" MacBook Pro. I have no idea why you got the system details you mention but they're not mine. I was running version 83 through Rosetta 2 emulation which probably explains some or all of the problem I was experiencing. I will try again when 84 is released next month.
I got the system details from the right panel by choosing Question Details -> More system details, which says this: User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.0.1 Safari/605.1.15
It must be a bug in the Mozilla Support forum software, detecting macOS Big Sur. I'll change the tag to macOS 11.0.1 Big Sur. In any case, I think that waiting for Firefox 84 to be released is the best choice.