Firefox 107 Is Now Available for Download with Power Profiling on Linux PCs with Intel CPUs

Firefox 107

Mozilla released today Firefox 107 for download as the latest stable version of its popular, free, cross-platform, and open-source web browser that brings new features and improvements.

The biggest change in Firefox 107 appears to be support for power profiling on Linux and Mac systems with Intel CPUs. This feature was already supported on Windows 11 and Apple M1 Macs since Firefox 104, but now it’s also available for Intel processors used in Linux/Mac desktop and laptop machines.

The Firefox power profiler lets you visualize performance data recorded from web browsers, which may come in handy if you’re using a laptop and you are concerned about battery life and want to extend it by avoiding websites that consume lots of CPU usage.

You can enable Firefox’s power profiling feature by accessing the hamburger menu at the top right of the window and clicking on More tools > Web Developer Tools. The Web Developer Tools will be displayed at the bottom of the screen and you’ll need to access the Performance tab and select Power from the drop-down list.

Then, open a website that you want to analyze and click the “Start recording” button when you’re ready to profile it. When you think you have enough data, just click on the “Capture recording” button and you’ll be able to see the results in a new tab (it will take a while for the results to appear depending on how much time you’ve spent on that website).

20-sec power profiling of 9to5linux.com
“Web browsers are popular applications and can be power-intensive, and therefore can significantly affect battery life. As a result, it is worth optimizing (i.e. reducing) the power consumption caused by Firefox and Firefox OS,” reads Mozilla’s documentation about power profiling.

For web developers, Firefox 107 adds the contain-intrinsic-size shorthand CSS property to specify the size of a UI element that is subject to size containment to allow a user agent to determine the size of an element without needing to render its child elements, and removes the deprecated SVGSVGElement.useCurrentView property.

Furthermore, it makes it easier to inspect pop-up windows (implemented by WebExtension) using DevTools and to reload changes in the source code of your WebExtension using a new “Reload” button in the DevTools toolbox.

Other than that, Firefox 107 is packed with the usual security and bug fixes (especially bugs related to scrolling) for a faster and more stable browsing experience. You can download the binaries for 64-bit or 32-bit GNU/Linux systems right now from the official website.

Of course, the Firefox 107 release will also hit the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution later this week if you have it installed from there, so make sure that you keep your installations up to date at all times.

Last updated 1 year ago

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