7 ms·

Everyone says Chrome devastates Mac battery life, but does it? 36 hour test

87 points by havaloc 2y ago

move-on-by 2y ago
I would be curious to see results with Firefox as well. I like to see people testing assumptions. I agree with the author’s primary point- it’s likely highly dependent on what tasks you are doing with the browser. The results are still interesting nonetheless.
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  For my use case, it's quite obvious what's draining the battery: addons. Every trick and feature meant to preserve privacy and to remove visual trash will significantly impact load times, responsiveness, and battery life. It's all worth it to me, but there's no doubt a web without tracking and ads would easily double my battery life.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    Those extensions usually improve performance, no?
    - g_p 2y ago
      When browsing a site full of JS-heavy ads, sure. When running a browser performance benchmark, generally not - the ad block extension adds an overhead to the page. I saw this when experimenting with Orion Browser on Mac, which uses the Webkit engine, but adds support for many Firefox and Chrome web extension APIs. In experimenting with that, I noticed that enabling extensions and using many extensions during benchmarks could easily impact on scores. Even just an ad blocker like uBO had a measurable impact on a benchmark, from my recollection.
      - saagarjha 2y ago
        Orion is using a web engine that was never really designed to support what they are trying to make it do. Obviously it's just code in the end but a lot of the changes will be made for convenience rather than in ways that make sense if you look at WebKit holistically, because the team is just too small to actually do that. So it is natural that performance suffers.
    - jeroenhd 2y ago
      Depends on what sites you visit, but hooking every single HTTP call and HTML DOM isn't cheap. I often find websites with ads to be just as fast as websites without them, just more cluttered, unusable, and more of a privacy nightmare. The uBO overhead does seem to impact CPU usage, though. I'll gladly pay the 15 minutes of battery power spent on filtering out that trash.
  - fallingsquirrel 2y ago
    It seems obvious to me that uBlock Origin uses less battery than an autoplaying video in the corner of every website you visit. So on balance I don't think it's fair to say the addons are the cause.
    - jeroenhd 2y ago
      With hardware video decoding, video playback is actually remarkably power efficient. That said, it's been ages since I've last seen an autoplaying video. I only seem to encounter them on American news websites for some reason.
  - hagbard_c 2y ago
    While there will be extensions which increase power consumption the opposite is true for the most used category, that being content blockers. A well-tuned uBlock Origin will cut down radically on the number of requests performed per page, the amount of CPU time wasted on non-essential Javascript, the amount of GPU render time wasted on presenting those horrid moving monstrosities called ads and the amount of energy wasted by the user while he waits for the damn page to stop loading. Never, ever venture out on the web without a content blocker.
- g_p 2y ago
  One other potential area of variability could come from browser extensions - I imagine that users who compare browser power performance are more technical than the median user, and are more likely to run browser extensions (e.g. ad blockers, etc). Given Chrome has a larger and more extensive collection of extensions, perhaps users who see differences are running more browser extensions in their Chrome installation, which impacts on performance/power usage? Certainly interesting to see these assumptions put to the test though, and get some data around them. While it looks like it may have fallen behind again a little, I noticed Firefox's browsing performance on Speedometer caught up for a while, contrary to what I had thought/assumed.
- GeekyBear 2y ago
  I think one big issue is that there are OS specific APIs on Windows and Mac that allow you to only redraw the pixels/layers of the web browser window that have changed, with the unchanged portion retained in memory and recomposited. We've seen versions of Safari and Edge that leverage those sorts of APIs to deliver better battery life on their respective platforms, but if you are writing a cross platform browser you may not be willing to do extra work for each individual platform. Several years ago, Firefox adopted the solution Chrome used of dividing the web browser window into large-ish sections, so you could at least skip redrawing sections that had not changed, but that still leaves you doing unnecessary work, just less of it. Prior to that, the battery drain using Firefox vs Safari on newer machines with higher resolution displays was very noticeable. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1422090 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1422090
  - bendhoefs 2y ago
    What are these APIs? Why isn't this possible on standard cross platform graphics APIs? Edit: I guess it's probably this sort of thing https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/directcomp/apply-2d-transforms https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/directcomp/a...
    - GeekyBear 2y ago
      On the Mac, it's the Core Animation layers API.
  - lilyball 2y ago
    All browser engines are cross-platform. Safari may be Mac-only (though there used to be a Safari for Windows), but the rendering is done by WebKit.
    - GeekyBear 2y ago
      We're talking about using features exposed by the OS (the Core Animation layers API in this example) to avoid doing unnecessary work to save battery life. Any browser could adopt each individual platform's proprietary graphics APIs, but using the same API everywhere (traditionally OpenGL) is less work.
lilyball 2y ago
The heaviest parts of the test were using Google sites. Google has been caught in the past letting their sites run worse on Safari than Chrome. I'd really like to see this test done without having a single Google property be involved.
- concinds 2y ago
  G Docs, alright, maybe, but any web battery test that doesn't involve YouTube simply wouldn't be representative.
  - lilyball 2y ago
    Representative of who? Not me, certainly, I don't use YouTube.
    - bufferoverflow 2y ago
      So when some interesting link leads to a youtube video, or someone sends a link to youtube directly to you, you just don't open it?
      - lol768 2y ago
        I normally look for text alternatives, to be honest. It's not necessarily a bias against YouTube, but more video-based content in general. If I can't find an alternative I'll skim it with subtitles on. I certainly wouldn't have it open for one and half hours in a 3 hour period though!
      - seszett 2y ago
        I know many people do watch YouTube videos but indeed, when a link leads to a YouTube video I don't follow it (and nobody ever just sends me links to YouTube). I do turn to YouTube if I need some kind of visual guide, like for auto repair sometimes, but it's rare. Most links to YouTube videos I find are excruciatingly slow explanations of something that could be done in two paragraphs and one screenshot, or some kind of meme that I don't find funny.
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jokoon 2y ago
I wish someone could design HTML6 around performance and good practice It's time to deprecate things
- meindnoch 2y ago
  Ok, here's the new HTML6 standard: Everything is the same as HTML5, but scripts are not allowed.
  - thih9 2y ago
    If recent history is any indicator, then we would reimplement react with iframes and “meta http-equiv=‘refresh’ content=‘1’” somehow.
- grishka 2y ago
  The most serious problem with the web IMO the endless scope creep. Maybe, idk, set a clear goal, work towards it, and then just stop and consider the web "done"? I hate it so much that almost everything in the IT industry is a process. It's necessarily unending. No one is shipping finished products anymore. Everything is in eternal beta. The web standards are the most egregious example of this.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    > The web standards are the most egregious example of this. Of course they are, the end game is browsers being the OS. But it's way too risky to give web sites direct unfettered access to the computer (ActiveX, remember the time and the many ways you could be fucked by that?), so a loooot of stuff has to be built as abstractions. WebGL/WebGPU, WebUSB, WebSerial, WebBluetooth... the only thing I'm still pissed about that didn't make the cut is WebSQL - IndexedDB and localStorage just suck in comparison to a proper SQL shell.
    - grishka 2y ago
      > Of course they are, the end game is browsers being the OS. But could we please not do that? Can I do something to prevent this from happening?
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junglistguy 2y ago
check "ungoogled chrome", it's awesome.
minkles 2y ago
My Mac battery is considerably more amazing than its default amazing state when I don't have any browser open or any Electron crud running. I blame the modern web. The browser is just the universe it runs in.
lapcat 2y ago
> More recently, I read the argument that it’s so bad that Chrome running it’s Chromium engine ought not be allowed to exist on iPhones and iPads. The subtext is John Gruber's post 6 days ago, defending Apple's iOS lockdown: "Imagine — and this takes a lot of imagination — if Google actually shipped a version of Chrome for iOS, only for the EU, that used its own battery-eating rendering engine instead of using the energy-efficient system version of WebKit." https://daringfireball.net/2024/09/ios_continental_drift_fun_gap https://daringfireball.net/2024/09/ios_continental_drift_fun...
- stavros 2y ago
  I didn't realize John Gruber had reached "cult leader" levels of apologism.
  - nordsieck 2y ago
    He's been that way for at least 10 years, from what I can tell.
    - stavros 2y ago
      I guess that explains why it's been about that long that I read something of his.
    - ksec 2y ago
      Things popularised or started by Gruber USB-C Invented by Apple. AirPod selling at cost. Apple invented big.LITTLE core. ( He later retract that ). Probably more than I could remember but those three were some of the worst because his reader would then go and spread the gospel.
      - kirb 2y ago
        The “USB-C invented by Apple” legend was even presented as fact on Wikipedia for a good while. Someone fixed it a few months ago. The source, of course, was Gruber and some “little birdies”. Ironically, the referenced 9to5mac article goes on to look at specs/press releases and conclude that there’s no evidence to his claim, in fact, the credit mostly goes to Intel and TI. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1232511036&oldid=1232173013&title=USB-C https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1232511036&oldid=1... https://9to5mac.com/2015/03/14/apple-invent-usb-type-c/ https://9to5mac.com/2015/03/14/apple-invent-usb-type-c/
turtlesdown11 2y ago
this "test" sounds pretty useless, and to immediately try to extrapolate the small sample to an eight hour battery life, lol
- wtallis 2y ago
  Are there any specific shortcomings you think render this test "useless"? It doesn't seem at all unreasonable to extrapolate from a 3-hour test repeated six times to estimate power usage over an 8+ hour span. Or is the "small sample" you refer to the 20-minute inner loop?
  - storafrid 2y ago
    I don't agree that it's useless either, but I would expect the test macro to match what I do while working: Opening multiple PRs in new tabs all the time, cloud vendor portal tabs, looking through logs and metrics, scrolling (more than watching) some YT video, lots of scrolling and switching of the 15 open tabs, navigating enterprise software portals that are badly written web apps (looking at you, Salesforce)... this is a normal workflow for me and I feel that it questions the crazy in the crazy macro. It also questions the sanity in me, but that's beside the point. Having a good amount of background processes running (terminal stuff, IDE, Slack, Google Drive, OneDrive, VPN etc. is probably hard to test without introducing more variance, but I can imagine they could play a part. Especially on an 8 GB unified memory MacBook.
malshe 2y ago
> Cards on the table, I’m an Arc guy on the desktop I have used Arc on my M1 MBP a couple of times but don't have enough usage to say anything about its performance. What are its advantages over Safari or Chrome?
- xnyan 2y ago
  It's hard to explain in a comment, but I started off very skeptical of "skinned chromes" like vivaldi, brave, etc before trying and loving arc. In short, I love it's general UI paradigm and it's customizability. In no particular order: command bar as a replacement for the nav bar, 1st class horizontal tabs, great keyboard shortcut support, great multi-profile support and automation, split screen browsing, tab and download management and more. It has some AI features I don't care about, but they are easy to turn off, I feel much more efficient and fewer barriers to browse the web in a way I grok with Arc. I'd say it's worth an install to try.
peterbmarks 2y ago
The test is dominated by YouTube watching which presumably Google Chrome is particularly optimised for.
hoistbypetard 2y ago
Assuming the Mac battery reporting is accurate, even running tests at different charge levels, seems specious to me. In my experience, it doesn’t tend to be. I don’t think it’d be biased to one browser over another in that way, but I don’t for a second believe that it can be used to make a statement like “Chrome used 17% of my battery life over 3 hours, then Safari used 18%.” I think it would be much more interesting to put together ~40 hours worth of testing similar to what the author did, then run it with Safari until the battery dies, charge the machine for X hours (where X is the amount of time the battery takes to report 100% plus some margin) then run it with Chrome until the battery dies. Repeat as many times as you think necessary. That would take battery percentage remaining reporting out of any load bearing place, which I believe is absolutely necessary here.
- LegionMammal978 2y ago
  As I read it, the author performed half the tests with Chrome followed by Safari, and the other half with Safari followed by Chrome, which should have eliminated any first-order bias. Though I agree that the magnitudes of the numbers are aren't really meaningful, short of doing a full 100%-to-0%-SoC discharge with each browser.
idunnoman1222 2y ago
Why would you use chrome if you have a Mac? I have chrome for the occasional site that doesn’t work, but safari never crashes
- wiseowise 2y ago
  Why would you use either of those when there’s Firefox?
- heraldgeezer 2y ago
  People use it for the google account integration. Logged in to all services, all history/bookmarks/tabs/passwords syncs over.
  - relaxing 2y ago
    I guess that makes sense. Safari iCloud integration is super convenient for syncing everything to my phone etc.
  - geor9e 2y ago
    history/bookmarks/tabs/passwords is easily synced via Safari > File > Import From > Google Chrome/Firefox and safari can log into google accounts just as easily as chrome can.
    - heraldgeezer 2y ago
      Yes, but normies won't do that. You don't even need to export, the new browser can usually import with the starting wizard.
- geor9e 2y ago
  My question is why use Safari, other than it being preinstalled? It feels barebones. There must be some reason most Mac users are go out of their way to avoid Safari. ~70% of Mac users use chrome or chromium browsers, versus only 19% who use safari, and 3% who still use firefox [I searched "mac browser market share" and clicked the first link]. My guess is it's the lack of good extensions. People spend a lot of time in the browser, so lack of customizability is frustrating.
diebeforei485 2y ago
Instead of YouTube and Google Docs, maybe it could be Netflix and Notion?
- prmoustache 2y ago
  Or the whole atlassian suite, github and teams + a single linkedin tab.
ksec 2y ago
I guess most people dont follow browser development anymore. We are now in 2024. Perhaps the peak of Chrome complaining battery drain was something in between 2018 - 2020. It also happens to be the peak of Safari is the new IE with so many web features missing and bugs unresolved. Both are correct to a certain degree and have been the case for many years before it reached what could be described as a PR crisis. Since then Safari had twice if not more features and bug fix than usual in the next few Safari releases. While Chrome worked on multi tab memory usage reduction, and efficiency. At the same time Firefox just went into polishing mode because a lot of the efficiency work already came from Servo, E10s and Memshrink over the past 10 years. In multi tab usage ( ~50 to 80 ) Chrome is already better than Safari simply because Safari still dont consider lots of Tabs on macOS as one of their usage scenario. And Chrome being better for that for at least 2 years. For 7000 tabs it is still better to use Firefox. I guess that is what I called battle tested. My record was only around 2000 Tabs, and that was 10 years ago. As a matter of fact, I would consider current Firefox ( 130 ) to be the best browser on the market, single tab or multi tab usage. Being the fastest and most efficient. The last time this happened was in pre Chrome IE 7 era. ( As one could argue IE 6 was better than Firefox )
bfrog 2y ago
Why wouldn’t it? Has to capture and send all that spyware data for better ad matching.
isaachawley 2y ago
He didn't mention an ad blocker. I wonder if that would change things. Especially if (like me) he's got an ad blocker in Chrome but not in Safari.
- jnrk 2y ago
  He did though: > […] but I did install an ad blocker on both for a few tests, but they didn’t change the results at all for me.
diebeforei485 2y ago
> I have the stable releases of each browser installed: Chrome 128 and Safari 17.6. Safari 18.0 just came out like two days after this was posted. If someone could re-run a benchmark that would be great.

87 points by havaloc 2y ago

I would be curious to see results with Firefox as well. I like to see people testing assumptions. I agree with the author’s primary point- it’s likely highly dependent on what tasks you are doing with the browser. The results are still interesting nonetheless.

jeroenhd 2y ago
For my use case, it's quite obvious what's draining the battery: addons. Every trick and feature meant to preserve privacy and to remove visual trash will significantly impact load times, responsiveness, and battery life. It's all worth it to me, but there's no doubt a web without tracking and ads would easily double my battery life.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Those extensions usually improve performance, no?
  - g_p 2y ago
    When browsing a site full of JS-heavy ads, sure. When running a browser performance benchmark, generally not - the ad block extension adds an overhead to the page. I saw this when experimenting with Orion Browser on Mac, which uses the Webkit engine, but adds support for many Firefox and Chrome web extension APIs. In experimenting with that, I noticed that enabling extensions and using many extensions during benchmarks could easily impact on scores. Even just an ad blocker like uBO had a measurable impact on a benchmark, from my recollection.
    - saagarjha 2y ago
      Orion is using a web engine that was never really designed to support what they are trying to make it do. Obviously it's just code in the end but a lot of the changes will be made for convenience rather than in ways that make sense if you look at WebKit holistically, because the team is just too small to actually do that. So it is natural that performance suffers.
  - jeroenhd 2y ago
    Depends on what sites you visit, but hooking every single HTTP call and HTML DOM isn't cheap. I often find websites with ads to be just as fast as websites without them, just more cluttered, unusable, and more of a privacy nightmare. The uBO overhead does seem to impact CPU usage, though. I'll gladly pay the 15 minutes of battery power spent on filtering out that trash.
- fallingsquirrel 2y ago
  It seems obvious to me that uBlock Origin uses less battery than an autoplaying video in the corner of every website you visit. So on balance I don't think it's fair to say the addons are the cause.
  - jeroenhd 2y ago
    With hardware video decoding, video playback is actually remarkably power efficient. That said, it's been ages since I've last seen an autoplaying video. I only seem to encounter them on American news websites for some reason.
- hagbard_c 2y ago
  While there will be extensions which increase power consumption the opposite is true for the most used category, that being content blockers. A well-tuned uBlock Origin will cut down radically on the number of requests performed per page, the amount of CPU time wasted on non-essential Javascript, the amount of GPU render time wasted on presenting those horrid moving monstrosities called ads and the amount of energy wasted by the user while he waits for the damn page to stop loading. Never, ever venture out on the web without a content blocker.
g_p 2y ago
One other potential area of variability could come from browser extensions - I imagine that users who compare browser power performance are more technical than the median user, and are more likely to run browser extensions (e.g. ad blockers, etc). Given Chrome has a larger and more extensive collection of extensions, perhaps users who see differences are running more browser extensions in their Chrome installation, which impacts on performance/power usage? Certainly interesting to see these assumptions put to the test though, and get some data around them. While it looks like it may have fallen behind again a little, I noticed Firefox's browsing performance on Speedometer caught up for a while, contrary to what I had thought/assumed.
GeekyBear 2y ago
I think one big issue is that there are OS specific APIs on Windows and Mac that allow you to only redraw the pixels/layers of the web browser window that have changed, with the unchanged portion retained in memory and recomposited. We've seen versions of Safari and Edge that leverage those sorts of APIs to deliver better battery life on their respective platforms, but if you are writing a cross platform browser you may not be willing to do extra work for each individual platform. Several years ago, Firefox adopted the solution Chrome used of dividing the web browser window into large-ish sections, so you could at least skip redrawing sections that had not changed, but that still leaves you doing unnecessary work, just less of it. Prior to that, the battery drain using Firefox vs Safari on newer machines with higher resolution displays was very noticeable. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1422090 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1422090
- bendhoefs 2y ago
  What are these APIs? Why isn't this possible on standard cross platform graphics APIs? Edit: I guess it's probably this sort of thing https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/directcomp/apply-2d-transforms https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/directcomp/a...
  - GeekyBear 2y ago
    On the Mac, it's the Core Animation layers API.
- lilyball 2y ago
  All browser engines are cross-platform. Safari may be Mac-only (though there used to be a Safari for Windows), but the rendering is done by WebKit.
  - GeekyBear 2y ago
    We're talking about using features exposed by the OS (the Core Animation layers API in this example) to avoid doing unnecessary work to save battery life. Any browser could adopt each individual platform's proprietary graphics APIs, but using the same API everywhere (traditionally OpenGL) is less work.

lilyball 2y ago

The heaviest parts of the test were using Google sites. Google has been caught in the past letting their sites run worse on Safari than Chrome. I'd really like to see this test done without having a single Google property be involved.

concinds 2y ago
G Docs, alright, maybe, but any web battery test that doesn't involve YouTube simply wouldn't be representative.
- lilyball 2y ago
  Representative of who? Not me, certainly, I don't use YouTube.
  - bufferoverflow 2y ago
    So when some interesting link leads to a youtube video, or someone sends a link to youtube directly to you, you just don't open it?
    - lol768 2y ago
      I normally look for text alternatives, to be honest. It's not necessarily a bias against YouTube, but more video-based content in general. If I can't find an alternative I'll skim it with subtitles on. I certainly wouldn't have it open for one and half hours in a 3 hour period though!
    - seszett 2y ago
      I know many people do watch YouTube videos but indeed, when a link leads to a YouTube video I don't follow it (and nobody ever just sends me links to YouTube). I do turn to YouTube if I need some kind of visual guide, like for auto repair sometimes, but it's rare. Most links to YouTube videos I find are excruciatingly slow explanations of something that could be done in two paragraphs and one screenshot, or some kind of meme that I don't find funny.

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jokoon 2y ago

I wish someone could design HTML6 around performance and good practice It's time to deprecate things

meindnoch 2y ago
Ok, here's the new HTML6 standard: Everything is the same as HTML5, but scripts are not allowed.
- thih9 2y ago
  If recent history is any indicator, then we would reimplement react with iframes and “meta http-equiv=‘refresh’ content=‘1’” somehow.
grishka 2y ago
The most serious problem with the web IMO the endless scope creep. Maybe, idk, set a clear goal, work towards it, and then just stop and consider the web "done"? I hate it so much that almost everything in the IT industry is a process. It's necessarily unending. No one is shipping finished products anymore. Everything is in eternal beta. The web standards are the most egregious example of this.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > The web standards are the most egregious example of this. Of course they are, the end game is browsers being the OS. But it's way too risky to give web sites direct unfettered access to the computer (ActiveX, remember the time and the many ways you could be fucked by that?), so a loooot of stuff has to be built as abstractions. WebGL/WebGPU, WebUSB, WebSerial, WebBluetooth... the only thing I'm still pissed about that didn't make the cut is WebSQL - IndexedDB and localStorage just suck in comparison to a proper SQL shell.
  - grishka 2y ago
    > Of course they are, the end game is browsers being the OS. But could we please not do that? Can I do something to prevent this from happening?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

junglistguy 2y ago

check "ungoogled chrome", it's awesome.

minkles 2y ago

My Mac battery is considerably more amazing than its default amazing state when I don't have any browser open or any Electron crud running. I blame the modern web. The browser is just the universe it runs in.

lapcat 2y ago

> More recently, I read the argument that it’s so bad that Chrome running it’s Chromium engine ought not be allowed to exist on iPhones and iPads. The subtext is John Gruber's post 6 days ago, defending Apple's iOS lockdown: "Imagine — and this takes a lot of imagination — if Google actually shipped a version of Chrome for iOS, only for the EU, that used its own battery-eating rendering engine instead of using the energy-efficient system version of WebKit." https://daringfireball.net/2024/09/ios_continental_drift_fun_gap https://daringfireball.net/2024/09/ios_continental_drift_fun...

stavros 2y ago
I didn't realize John Gruber had reached "cult leader" levels of apologism.
- nordsieck 2y ago
  He's been that way for at least 10 years, from what I can tell.
  - stavros 2y ago
    I guess that explains why it's been about that long that I read something of his.
  - ksec 2y ago
    Things popularised or started by Gruber USB-C Invented by Apple. AirPod selling at cost. Apple invented big.LITTLE core. ( He later retract that ). Probably more than I could remember but those three were some of the worst because his reader would then go and spread the gospel.
    - kirb 2y ago
      The “USB-C invented by Apple” legend was even presented as fact on Wikipedia for a good while. Someone fixed it a few months ago. The source, of course, was Gruber and some “little birdies”. Ironically, the referenced 9to5mac article goes on to look at specs/press releases and conclude that there’s no evidence to his claim, in fact, the credit mostly goes to Intel and TI. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1232511036&oldid=1232173013&title=USB-C https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=1232511036&oldid=1... https://9to5mac.com/2015/03/14/apple-invent-usb-type-c/ https://9to5mac.com/2015/03/14/apple-invent-usb-type-c/

turtlesdown11 2y ago

this "test" sounds pretty useless, and to immediately try to extrapolate the small sample to an eight hour battery life, lol

wtallis 2y ago
Are there any specific shortcomings you think render this test "useless"? It doesn't seem at all unreasonable to extrapolate from a 3-hour test repeated six times to estimate power usage over an 8+ hour span. Or is the "small sample" you refer to the 20-minute inner loop?
- storafrid 2y ago
  I don't agree that it's useless either, but I would expect the test macro to match what I do while working: Opening multiple PRs in new tabs all the time, cloud vendor portal tabs, looking through logs and metrics, scrolling (more than watching) some YT video, lots of scrolling and switching of the 15 open tabs, navigating enterprise software portals that are badly written web apps (looking at you, Salesforce)... this is a normal workflow for me and I feel that it questions the crazy in the crazy macro. It also questions the sanity in me, but that's beside the point. Having a good amount of background processes running (terminal stuff, IDE, Slack, Google Drive, OneDrive, VPN etc. is probably hard to test without introducing more variance, but I can imagine they could play a part. Especially on an 8 GB unified memory MacBook.

malshe 2y ago

> Cards on the table, I’m an Arc guy on the desktop I have used Arc on my M1 MBP a couple of times but don't have enough usage to say anything about its performance. What are its advantages over Safari or Chrome?

xnyan 2y ago
It's hard to explain in a comment, but I started off very skeptical of "skinned chromes" like vivaldi, brave, etc before trying and loving arc. In short, I love it's general UI paradigm and it's customizability. In no particular order: command bar as a replacement for the nav bar, 1st class horizontal tabs, great keyboard shortcut support, great multi-profile support and automation, split screen browsing, tab and download management and more. It has some AI features I don't care about, but they are easy to turn off, I feel much more efficient and fewer barriers to browse the web in a way I grok with Arc. I'd say it's worth an install to try.

peterbmarks 2y ago

The test is dominated by YouTube watching which presumably Google Chrome is particularly optimised for.

hoistbypetard 2y ago

Assuming the Mac battery reporting is accurate, even running tests at different charge levels, seems specious to me. In my experience, it doesn’t tend to be. I don’t think it’d be biased to one browser over another in that way, but I don’t for a second believe that it can be used to make a statement like “Chrome used 17% of my battery life over 3 hours, then Safari used 18%.” I think it would be much more interesting to put together ~40 hours worth of testing similar to what the author did, then run it with Safari until the battery dies, charge the machine for X hours (where X is the amount of time the battery takes to report 100% plus some margin) then run it with Chrome until the battery dies. Repeat as many times as you think necessary. That would take battery percentage remaining reporting out of any load bearing place, which I believe is absolutely necessary here.

LegionMammal978 2y ago
As I read it, the author performed half the tests with Chrome followed by Safari, and the other half with Safari followed by Chrome, which should have eliminated any first-order bias. Though I agree that the magnitudes of the numbers are aren't really meaningful, short of doing a full 100%-to-0%-SoC discharge with each browser.

idunnoman1222 2y ago

Why would you use chrome if you have a Mac? I have chrome for the occasional site that doesn’t work, but safari never crashes

wiseowise 2y ago
Why would you use either of those when there’s Firefox?
heraldgeezer 2y ago
People use it for the google account integration. Logged in to all services, all history/bookmarks/tabs/passwords syncs over.
- relaxing 2y ago
  I guess that makes sense. Safari iCloud integration is super convenient for syncing everything to my phone etc.
- geor9e 2y ago
  history/bookmarks/tabs/passwords is easily synced via Safari > File > Import From > Google Chrome/Firefox and safari can log into google accounts just as easily as chrome can.
  - heraldgeezer 2y ago
    Yes, but normies won't do that. You don't even need to export, the new browser can usually import with the starting wizard.
geor9e 2y ago
My question is why use Safari, other than it being preinstalled? It feels barebones. There must be some reason most Mac users are go out of their way to avoid Safari. ~70% of Mac users use chrome or chromium browsers, versus only 19% who use safari, and 3% who still use firefox [I searched "mac browser market share" and clicked the first link]. My guess is it's the lack of good extensions. People spend a lot of time in the browser, so lack of customizability is frustrating.

diebeforei485 2y ago

Instead of YouTube and Google Docs, maybe it could be Netflix and Notion?

prmoustache 2y ago
Or the whole atlassian suite, github and teams + a single linkedin tab.

ksec 2y ago

I guess most people dont follow browser development anymore. We are now in 2024. Perhaps the peak of Chrome complaining battery drain was something in between 2018 - 2020. It also happens to be the peak of Safari is the new IE with so many web features missing and bugs unresolved. Both are correct to a certain degree and have been the case for many years before it reached what could be described as a PR crisis. Since then Safari had twice if not more features and bug fix than usual in the next few Safari releases. While Chrome worked on multi tab memory usage reduction, and efficiency. At the same time Firefox just went into polishing mode because a lot of the efficiency work already came from Servo, E10s and Memshrink over the past 10 years. In multi tab usage ( ~50 to 80 ) Chrome is already better than Safari simply because Safari still dont consider lots of Tabs on macOS as one of their usage scenario. And Chrome being better for that for at least 2 years. For 7000 tabs it is still better to use Firefox. I guess that is what I called battle tested. My record was only around 2000 Tabs, and that was 10 years ago. As a matter of fact, I would consider current Firefox ( 130 ) to be the best browser on the market, single tab or multi tab usage. Being the fastest and most efficient. The last time this happened was in pre Chrome IE 7 era. ( As one could argue IE 6 was better than Firefox )

bfrog 2y ago

Why wouldn’t it? Has to capture and send all that spyware data for better ad matching.

isaachawley 2y ago

He didn't mention an ad blocker. I wonder if that would change things. Especially if (like me) he's got an ad blocker in Chrome but not in Safari.

jnrk 2y ago
He did though: > […] but I did install an ad blocker on both for a few tests, but they didn’t change the results at all for me.

diebeforei485 2y ago

> I have the stable releases of each browser installed: Chrome 128 and Safari 17.6. Safari 18.0 just came out like two days after this was posted. If someone could re-run a benchmark that would be great.