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Comment by altcognito | Hacker News Reader

> One of our Mac-using editors notes that the current version of Safari consumes about 15 percent of CPU resources when running in the background, so these power losses can be significant.

Seriously? I can't say I've had an app use more than 3-5% of my CPU while it was sitting idle. I don't think it has anything with my OS. Is this what others are experiencing?

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Honestly, it's probably a flash ad somewhere.

Turning on plugin click-to-activate is good for power, too, not just security.

I'd sacrifice a lot to have that be the default, just out of charity for everyone elses' benefit.

Because the usage is percentage based, of course it depends entirely on which CPU you currently have. I imagine 3-5% of the latest Macbook Pro Retina i7, isn't the same as the 2010 Macbook Air's Core 2 Duo.

It's happening here on my Mac. It goes from 12% to 30% even when the application is hidden. I'm running the latest Safari with three windows and seven open tabs on average.

Safari 6 has been a major resource hog. But I can't stand that ugliness of Chrome. Solution while the next iteration doesn't solve this: close tabs or add ram.

As another commenter suggested, I suspect ClickToFlash or something similar would help. For comparison, on the same version of Safari, I have more than 50 tabs open in several windows and Safari uses about 3% CPU in the background.

I forgot to mention. I don't have Flash installed on Safari.

Badly written websites or plugins can easily cause that to increase. On my rMPB at the moment, Firefox is in the background and using 10-12% CPU. Chrome has Silverlight running for some reason (probably from when I used Netflix earlier), and that is using 8-10% CPU.

Safari itself does not magically eat your CPU but websites running badly written javascript do. (Not to mention the infamous plugin thingy from Adobe, which any sane person will disable anyway.)

So, the CPU usage of Safari totally depends on what websites you happen to have open.

On my box, Mail.app is currently using about 8% and eclipse is using about 8%.

On my PowerPC based PowerBook 14" background apps like Mail would consume 2-4% CPU quite often. Now on my Mac Mini with an i7 processor, it's about the same percentage!

2% of a contemporary processor it alot more than 2% of a 10 year old one.

So is Mail now doing alot more in the backgound than before? Or is this some artifact in the way CPU utilitation is measured?

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