Do more with Chrome on a single charge on MacBooks | Hacker News Reader

Do more with Chrome on a single charge on MacBooks

blog.chromium.org

49 pointsfeross33 comments

It's funny, all three of these optimizations seem like they would mainly apply to ads and tracking scripts

One interpretation is that those are just one of the biggest power-sinks, so they're a high-value thing to target. But a cynical take is that the Chrome team is trying to give people less reason to use an ad blocker (or just generally make ads/tracking more tolerable). Of course both can be true at the same time

> In our testing, we found that you can browse for 17 hours or watch YouTube for 18 hours on a MacBook Pro (13", M2, 2022)

Compared to which numbers before the update?

"According to Apple's specifications, the MacBook Pro 13 (2022) can provide up to 20 hours of Apple TV movie playback and up to 17 hours of wireless web browsing."

Interesting. Looks like Chrome just fixed energy issues with their app to keep up with Safari?

Anyway, they don't say anything about brightness and number before fixes, yeah.

None of these improvements seem Mac-specific. Does Chrome on other OSs have these?

If you want to maximize battery life on a Mac, you need to do Mac-specific things. The most energy efficient way to do things is to hook into proprietary APIs such as CTS and GCD. You can’t get around these by doing it yourself because they’re designed to coordinate tasks across all running processes.

This high level of coordination improves efficiency because the CPU can wake up, crank through the queue of scheduled tasks, and go back to sleep. If every process does it DIY, then the CPU just gets woken up repeatedly and your battery dies a death by a thousand cuts.

I don't see in the article where they mention using Mac-specific APIs though

Can someone explain to me how I'm supposed to develop an Enterprise web app, that requires a regular "liveliness" check-in and to continue to receive timely notifications without internet access (internal only)?

Between all the creative ways they're finding to decide they should throttle a tab or put it to sleep, and the ways they keep screwing with timers/intervals, I feel like I'm being forced back to pushing for a fat client. Is there web technology I'm missing that will allow me to achieve this without having to use internet access and pushing notifications through a third party?

Web Push?

https://web.dev/notifications/

I have never once consented to a "let me send you notifications" request from a website, so this seems like a bad solution. They're widely abused by random trashy websites so it seems like it would be hard to get end users to consent so your app can use them to avoid timer throttling.

OP says

without internet access (internal only)?

so this would be an internal work site. Not spam. Valid to use and approve notifications.

> without internet access

genuine question, why not write a desktop app instead?

There's a way to cheat and keep persistent timers ticking (albeit at a reduced rate) for longer, but if I describe how it works online they'll fix it :) The timer throttling algorithm(s) are documented.

Make a desktop/mobile app, unfortunately. Web platform people don't want your app.

chrome://settings/performance -- you can add sites that should remain active

I don't know how to mass administer this across an enterprise, but presumably it would leverage existing tools.

It sounds like you need an Electron app. Seriously. I’m not a fan of it, but it’s the web backend with knobs for you to prevent power-saving modes from interfering with your website.

I’ve been using safari for the last two years, the main reason being battery usage and integration with keychain. But I keep hearing about how it’s not the best at rendering pages because developers have to implement workarounds for safari all the time, so it made me wonder if the sites I use would work better in Chrome. Not to mention the extension library.

Honestly I haven’t felt a difference, and thinking that Chrome uses more ram and cpu also pushes me away from it. I hope this actually makes a difference so I can continue my transition.

I have been using Safari for a decade or so.

At the time i made the decision, the alternatives were Chrome and Firefox, and one sends all my data to Google, the other was sluggish at the time.

Both have made improvements since, but to be honest, like you i don't notice any difference. Everything i visit renders as expected, and i keep a "backup" Chrome/Firefox installed "just in case", but i can't remember the last time i used either of them.

Why are you making an effort to transition to Chrome if you don't even notice a compatibility improvement?

Man, I have an M1 Mac and downloaded Chrome about a week ago. This thing drains my battery. I mean, I still get 10 hours out of the machine, but it's extraordinarily bad - running Chrome made me hear my Mac's fans for the first time since I bought it (>2 years)!

Safari isn't a browser I like, but one that I need to use - every other browser is simply too inefficient.

You could try Orion[0] which is based on Safari. It fixes a lot of issues I have with Safari. It's also available for iOS and does even support uBlock Origin on iOS.

[0] https://browser.kagi.com/

Orion is great, but it does have some extension compatibility issues. One huge annoyance for me is 1Password. Apparently, they refuse to whitelist Orion because it’s a niche browser. I’m all for more people using it so they change their minds.

> We identified data structures in which there were frequent accesses with the same key and optimized their access pattern.

What does this mean? The image implies the use of some sort of associative data structure implemented by linear search. But no one does that.

my interpretation was that they were just caching the last accessed key+value and checking query keys against that last accessed key in hopes to skip the hashing/indexing.

>In our testing, we found that you can browse for 17 hours or watch YouTube for 18 hours

I'm quite interested in how YouTube can give more hours than browsing. Is it due to the bloat of modern webpages or something else?

If the user is watching YouTube, the system is spending most of its non-idle time downloading chunks of video, shoveling them into the decoder, and piping the output to the screen. This is a heavily hardware-accelerated workflow, and is quite efficient. The structure of the YouTube web app helps, too; it's a (well disguised) single-page app, so the browser doesn't even have to reload/reparse scripts when navigating from one video to another.

Browsing web pages is much more chaotic. As the user scrolls through the page, the system is having to render parts of the page (on the CPU), evaluate CSS rules, run scripts... the works. When the user navigates to a new page, that's a whole bunch of new HTML, CSS, and scripts that have to be parsed. And so on.

I think a big part of it is just the smooth scrolling. On my iPhone, I can see power draw double as I scroll. (My charger displays this).

I remember having to disable smooth scrolling when I had a computer barely capable of playing mp3s.

Will this also improve performance of Electron apps on Mac?

It would need to get into Electron, if possible, then apps would need to update to the newest Electron - which many apps don’t always do.

As a Linux user I can confirm that they can lag years behind the current version of Electron.

Does anyone know how to get a job as a chrome developer?

Given that Google is currently conducting layoffs I suspect this is rather harder than usual just now. That said:

- I see at least one Chrome-related job still being advertised. [1] - I imagine that having a track record of making significant contributions to the Chromium open-source project might be the kind of thing that makes a difference in get yourself an interview for such a position.

[1]: https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/92917086071726790-se...

[Disclaimer: I work at Google but have no direct knowledge of recruiting in general or for Chrome in particular; everything in this post is based on public information and/or my own opinion.]

I’d suggest contributing to blink as an OSS developer to get your name known.

But at the same time Google is laying off thousands of people atm so I wouldn’t hold my breath for any reqs.

I would guess you should google that information

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