How to use firefox to save battery and combat ghost image, a brief guide

clevin

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Nov 12, 2010
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Its no secret that AMOLED display uses less power when display darker colors. When displaying pure black, the screen consumes no power, while it consumes maximum power displaying pure white.

FireShot Screen Capture #077 - 'Galaxy Note 4 and Note Edge OLED Display Technology Shoot-Out' -.png

Assume your screen takes up 30-50% of the battery consumed, you could be prolonging your battery life on a charge by up to a third to 50%, by displaying primarily dark content.

Now most of the webpages nowadays have white background, fortunately, there are ways to "fix" this.

First, take a look at before and after of my "fix". Left pic is "before", right one is "after".

Screenshots_2014-10-22-20-11-13.jpgScreenshots_2014-10-22-20-12-15.jpg

As you can see, the whole page is now 95% black. You will also notice that the urlbar and OS notification bar were both gone. The firefox is in true "full screen mode". This helps to combat the ghost image caused by static notification bar.

Here is the addon needed for this trick:

Screenshots_2014-10-22-20-11-34.jpg

The first one "black background and white text" is responsible for turning most webpage's background into pure black.
The second one "full screen" is responsible for enabling the true "full screen mode".

One problem you will have, is that in "full screen mode", you will lose access to urlbar and tab management icon, for this, I use the third addon "quick gestures", which allows me to swipe quickly on screen to 1), show urlbar, 2) jump between tabs, 3) close tab, 4) goto home/top site, etc.

NOTE: above screenshots were taken from my Note3. I understand this is not for everyone, just provide some information in case you are interested, the addon "black background and white text" use a javascript to re-style the page, this may cause slow downs in some webpage loading processes.