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Is that because of the quality of Chrome or because Safari is a "blessed" application and probably gets to do things other applications do not? Entirely seriou

Is that because of the quality of Chrome or because Safari is a "blessed" application and probably gets to do things other applications do not? Entirely serious question. Apple is known to severely privilege their own applications over competitors.

dijit 4y ago
Its been a really long time but safari on Windows was a thing and it did run a lot leaner in the background than anything else available at the time (except Opera if memory serves). It’s entirely possible that Safari is intentionally avoiding features that make it wake up- I doubt that it does anything unavailable to other browsers, thats MS territory, because they wanted features. I feel like safari, by contrast, doesn't want to add features.
LeoPanthera 4y ago
It's not impossible, but I doubt it, if only because very few third party applications use as much as Chrome does. The only exceptions are things that actively use a lot of CPU, like compilers or compressors.
jeron 4y ago
Blessed or not, I still end up using Safari. The improvement in battery life is too significant to ignore
- gnicholas 4y ago
  Have you compared versus Orion, which is also based on WebKit (and can run most Chrome and Firefox extensions)? IME, Safari is no better than Brave in terms of battery, even when I’ve got hundreds of tabs open.
drdrey 4y ago
That's because optimizing for battery life is a stated goal of the Safari team, it's actively benchmarked
ojosilva 4y ago
Totally guesswork here, but I'd say Chrome has a lot more telemetry, profiling and tracking built-in and its users tend to use a lot more plugins, including things like ad-blockers that scan over each webpage and can be beneficial (battery-wise) or not depending on content. Safari users are more of a barefoot type. A power user is more likely to not be running Safari. And a power user may, well, prefer to sacrifice battery power to get the power they seek. Besides, there's some precedent set in 1998 by a certain OS that "favored" their embedded browser over the competition, so I doubt Apple would want to tickle that fancy.
tshaddox 4y ago
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.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Third party developers are free to go here and see what Apple is doing: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit > Most users wouldn’t even notice that their choice to use Safari is responsible for their great battery life. Seeing that MacOS has called out which apps are using the most energy for years, users can definitely tell which apps are using the most battery life.
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    Apple can and does leave things out of that repo.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      So you think there is a conspiracy by Apple to not allow third parties to be battery efficient and make there hardware look bad? But you are free to download the source code, compile and run it yourself to see if it is less battery efficient than the official builds.
      - Karunamon 4y ago
        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.
        4y ago
scarface74 4y ago
If only the underlying engine were open source so people could see what “secret APIs” (sic) it was using…
saagarjha 4y ago
It’s mostly that they care. Chrome is designed with the mindset that it’s the most important thing running on your computer.
HWR_14 4y ago
If I had to guess, it's that Apple refuses to implement very CPU-heavy JS features they don't think add much value in Safari. I recall some feature I was using that ran in an inferior way to save power on Safari, so much so that I had to kill that feature and use a different API
- TheKarateKid 4y ago
  I think it's more that Apple implements power saving behavior into the JS engine on desktop much like they do on mobile. For example, pausing background scripts on inactive tabs and disallowing autoplay on videos even on desktop.
gnicholas 4y ago
I’ve not noticed a difference between safari and brave, so I’d say the former is not blessed.
TheKarateKid 4y ago
It's because of the quality of Chrome. Google's focus is on features and security, with efficiency secondary. Safari's primary focus is efficiency. Google's only incentive to make Chrome more efficient is when they start receiving heat (no pun intended) about bad performance.
- funcDropShadow 4y ago
  Googles focus is to collect as much data about the user as possible, nothing else.

dijit 4y ago

Its been a really long time but safari on Windows was a thing and it did run a lot leaner in the background than anything else available at the time (except Opera if memory serves). It’s entirely possible that Safari is intentionally avoiding features that make it wake up- I doubt that it does anything unavailable to other browsers, thats MS territory, because they wanted features. I feel like safari, by contrast, doesn't want to add features.

LeoPanthera 4y ago

It's not impossible, but I doubt it, if only because very few third party applications use as much as Chrome does. The only exceptions are things that actively use a lot of CPU, like compilers or compressors.

jeron 4y ago

Blessed or not, I still end up using Safari. The improvement in battery life is too significant to ignore

gnicholas 4y ago
Have you compared versus Orion, which is also based on WebKit (and can run most Chrome and Firefox extensions)? IME, Safari is no better than Brave in terms of battery, even when I’ve got hundreds of tabs open.

drdrey 4y ago

That's because optimizing for battery life is a stated goal of the Safari team, it's actively benchmarked

ojosilva 4y ago

Totally guesswork here, but I'd say Chrome has a lot more telemetry, profiling and tracking built-in and its users tend to use a lot more plugins, including things like ad-blockers that scan over each webpage and can be beneficial (battery-wise) or not depending on content. Safari users are more of a barefoot type. A power user is more likely to not be running Safari. And a power user may, well, prefer to sacrifice battery power to get the power they seek. Besides, there's some precedent set in 1998 by a certain OS that "favored" their embedded browser over the competition, so I doubt Apple would want to tickle that fancy.

tshaddox 4y ago

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.

scarface74 4y ago
Third party developers are free to go here and see what Apple is doing: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit > Most users wouldn’t even notice that their choice to use Safari is responsible for their great battery life. Seeing that MacOS has called out which apps are using the most energy for years, users can definitely tell which apps are using the most battery life.
- saagarjha 4y ago
  Apple can and does leave things out of that repo.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    So you think there is a conspiracy by Apple to not allow third parties to be battery efficient and make there hardware look bad? But you are free to download the source code, compile and run it yourself to see if it is less battery efficient than the official builds.
    - Karunamon 4y ago
      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.
      - 4y ago

scarface74 4y ago

If only the underlying engine were open source so people could see what “secret APIs” (sic) it was using…

saagarjha 4y ago

It’s mostly that they care. Chrome is designed with the mindset that it’s the most important thing running on your computer.

HWR_14 4y ago

If I had to guess, it's that Apple refuses to implement very CPU-heavy JS features they don't think add much value in Safari. I recall some feature I was using that ran in an inferior way to save power on Safari, so much so that I had to kill that feature and use a different API

TheKarateKid 4y ago
I think it's more that Apple implements power saving behavior into the JS engine on desktop much like they do on mobile. For example, pausing background scripts on inactive tabs and disallowing autoplay on videos even on desktop.

gnicholas 4y ago

I’ve not noticed a difference between safari and brave, so I’d say the former is not blessed.

TheKarateKid 4y ago

It's because of the quality of Chrome. Google's focus is on features and security, with efficiency secondary. Safari's primary focus is efficiency. Google's only incentive to make Chrome more efficient is when they start receiving heat (no pun intended) about bad performance.

funcDropShadow 4y ago
Googles focus is to collect as much data about the user as possible, nothing else.