I would be at least slightly surprised if Apple would deliberately hold back power-saving techniques from third party developers. It’s not like this is something that makes Safari much more appealing to users. Most users wouldn’t even notice that their choice to use Safari is responsible for their great battery life.
I absolutely think there is a conspiracy (inasmuch as "conspiracy" can be defined as "not going out of their way to change it") to make the competitors to Apple applications look worse than their own offerings. It does not reflect poorly on Apple when Firefox performs worse and uses more memory and battery than Safari.
How is Apple suppose to change Firefox and Chrome’s source code?
If either browser’s manufacturer wants to see what Apple does to make Safari more battery efficient, they are free to look at the source code to WebKit.
And as the other person told you already, Safari.app is not what you get if you build the WebKit source. In much the same way that you can't judge Chrome by Chromium, one is the base of the other, not the whole.