925629 - Power consumption skyrocketing since FF22

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox :: Untriaged, defect)

Description

[Simon Broenner]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130511120803

Steps to reproduce:

Install FF22 or higher, watch battery life plummet.


Actual results:

~20-30% reduction in battery life.


Expected results:

No reduction in battery life compared to FF21.

Related issue here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=887129

The problem seems to be getting worse with newer versions (FF23 & FF24), as GMail is no longer the only affected site. Even a single browser window with only a blank tab open has about 2W higher power consumption on FF24 than on FF21.

Comment 1

[Loic]

Try with HWA disabled:
https://support.mozilla.org/fr/kb/resoudre-problemes-firefox-logiciels-malveillants

Comment 2

[Loic]

Wrong link, see https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/forum-response-disable-hardware-acceleration

Comment 3

[Simon Broenner]

Hi, HWA is always disabled here. :(

Comment 4

[Simon Broenner]

I'm noticing that the issue is sporadically confined to sites with heavy scripting (Javascript or similar, especially with any kind of moving or movable graphical elements). I say sporadically because, as mentioned above, the issue sometimes also occurs when just a single blank tab is open...

Comment 5

[nemo]

Could that be the reason for the fairly poor showing of FF on http://www.anandtech.com/print/8327/browser-faceoff-battery-life-explored-2014
?

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

/me slightly perplexed.  You closed your bug 887129 but not this one, which appears to be the same issue.

If they are are the same we should dupe to bug 887129. 
If not the same, does this still reproduce?

Comment 7

[Simon Broenner]

The bug still occurs on sites other than GMail, hence closing the GMail-specific bug.

Comment 8

[Loic]

Firstly, could you type about:support and copy the section about "graphics".

Secondly, as you're able to reproduce the battery issue, could you install the tool mozregression (see http://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/ for details) to find a possible regression range as you noticed the issue appeared with FF22.

To use mozregression, if the issue is reproducible with a new profile by just loading a website, no need to use a specific profile, mozreg will create a new one at each nightly. If that's not the case, duplicate your current one, rename it and use it with mozregreession (see the tutorial).
FF22 nightlies started in early 2013 (--good=2013-01-01).

Comment 9

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard