Firefox

I noticed the same thing. It seems like there's a lot of background battery usage. I switched it from "optimized" or "unrestricted", I don't remember which, to "restricted". I don't use Firefox for any reason I'd want notifications, so I don't need it running in the background at all.

The one downside is that I have the search widget on my phone set to open things up in a private window, which is nice to avoid ending up with 1000 tabs open, but private windows now are not as persistent. Like if I looked up a recipe in a private window, a few minutes later, that window will be gone. I might have to switch the power setting to "optimized" and find a way to reduce background battery usage from within the app

How many tabs do you have open? I have quite a few and it can cause battery to drop a lot. It also occasionally starts using a lot of battery in the background for no apparent reason, which is fixed by just force-quitting the app.

It could also just be that Firefox is inherently more energy intensive than a Lemmy client. Browsers have to handle a lot of stuff to render web pages, while clients for sites just have to send some API calls. I might try using another browser for a few days and see if the battery usage is comparable to Firefox.

Dark reader has lost popularity because I think its spyware now, but to the point: uB origin is super light on resources so I do not think so.