Mozilla Firefox uses “Efficiency Mode” on Windows 11 22H2 to limit the resource usage of its background tabs. The addition reduces Power usage on the device and results in increased battery life. But, if you’ve any reason to disable Efficiency Mode for Firefox on Windows 11, you can do so, permanently; here is how.
Mozilla added Windows 11 Efficiency Mode support to Firefox with verison 108. With Firefox processes running, you can see a green leaf next to its processes in Task Manager.
Almost all apps and web browsers put their background processes in Efficiency mode. This benefits the user and improves the performance. You may not notice any difference at all
Low-end devices see improvements because of power reduction. If you feel Firefox is lagging or freezing or ‘not responding” with Efficiency mode, you can permanently disable it.
Before doing that, it is possible to achieve that temporarily from the Task Manager.
How to disable Efficiency Mode for Firefox temporarily from Task Manager
- Ensure Firefox is running, open Task Manager,
- Expand Firefox Processes
- Right-click on a Firefox process that appears with a green leaf and uncheck “Efficiency mode”
- You need to do this for each process that has Efficiency Mode enabled.
The above process is tedious and Firefox sets the QoS of background content processes to Eco after some time again. So, you can’t entirely disable efficiency mode this way. However, Firefox offers a hidden secret setting for that.
How to permanently disable Efficiency Mode for Firefox on Windows 11
- Launch Firefox
- Visit about:config
- Click “Accept the Risk and Continue”
- Search for “ecoqos”, and in the displayed results, toggle “dom.ipc.processPriorityManager.backgroundUsesEcoQoS” pref value to false.
- Restart Firefox
Note: Always be cautious when modifying settings in the about:config page in Firefox, as it may affect the browser’s behavior. Proceed with caution and only make changes if you are confident about the settings you are adjusting.
If you’re using Chrome, check this article for details on how to disable the efficiency mode for it.
What’s your take on this? Are you happy with Firefox’s performance with Efficiency mode enabled on Windows 11? Let us know in the comments below.
Final words: Efficiency Mode on Windows 11 can improve battery life and performance by limiting resource usage on Firefox background tabs. If you feel it is not necessary, you can disable it using the pref in Configuration Editor.
More on Firefox:
Firefox now supports adding images in PDF documents
Firefox 116: How to allow each extension to run on sites restricted by Mozilla
How to disable Firefox’s ‘Some extensions are not allowed” Message
Firefox removes ‘about:performance’ in favor of ‘about:processes’
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