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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

I switched browsers for a different reason: I installed OS X Yosemite beta and it seems like the Safari browser uses far less COU resources, noticeable by longer battery life.

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Chrome (browser) is becoming its own operating system. On windows there is about 10 processes running in the background when I have Chrome open that take up massive amounts of memory and are using the CPU.

Safari is simply a browser, probably using far fewer resources.

Each tab and plugin has its own process, plus another process for the browser itself. Take a look at Chrome's Task Manager for some more insight.

My apologies for the off-topic, but I wanted to ask how you are finding Yosemite - is it stable enough for me to switch over my dev machine?

Yes, is pretty stable on my old MacBook white. The only thing that crashed was Xcode Playgrounds.

You also will see some pixelated rounded corners for some contextual menus... but hey, this is beta.

http://i.imgur.com/IMys5f6.png

How are you running Yosemite on a white MacBook? Is it a 4,1 2008-ish MacBook that maxes out at 4GB of RAM? Just curious, because I have one of those but I'm still running SL on it because I figured Mavericks would be a dog.

I have a MacBook White Unibody (13-inch, Late 2009) with 8GB of RAM. This have a 64-Bit architecture and I can run the latest OSX without any problems.

http://support.apple.com/kb/sp579

> two SO-DIMM slots support up to 4GB

... confused

I think the reason Apple specified 4GB is max is because four years ago there were not any 4GB sticks for testing and Apple does not retest years later for a discontinued product.

http://i.imgur.com/CKbdu6c.png

I have it too...it's really slow and it just has a general feel of instability to me. Everything takes pretty long to load and there are some weird graphical glitches with scrolling. Missing textures also abound, but that's a comparatively minor complaint. Handoff is even functioning on a rudimentary level, albeit only if you install iOS 8, which is far, far worse bug wise than Yosemite is.

I'd honestly wait. I put it on a separate partition so I didn't have to deal with it if it pooped out.

It seems fairly stable to me on my MBA.

It also helps, of course, that Safari (or Firefox for that matter) doesn't crash whenever you mouse over a scrollbar (or cause a scrollbar to be displayed by scrolling the page if your mac is configured that way).

Worthwhile noting that even if you have the Flash Player Plug-in installed in Safari it runs much smoother & is less resource intensive than Chrome. Apple seem to have done a great job on the latest Safari.

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