Browser Face-Off: Battery Life Explored 2014 | Hacker News Reader

Browser Face-Off: Battery Life Explored 2014

anandtech.com

38 pointsnkurz12 comments

Safari for Windows was abandoned 2 years ago by Apple with no announcement and no transition plan. It's now got quite a few unpatched security vulnerabilities and shouldn't be used by anyone. I'm not sure why it even warranted a mentioned in this article.

Interesting. I'd like to see a similar test for OS X - at least anecdotally, Chrome seems to destroy my battery life compared to Safari (though to what extent App Nap helps Safari in that regard, I'm not certain.)

Same issue here with 10.9 and Chrome 36.

Get 4h45m with Chrome versus 6h30m with Safari doing the same tasks daily on a 2011 MBP i7.

Not overly bothered as I work right next to a power socket all day every day but it's an interesting statistic.

Well you'll go through battery cycles more often, resulting in comparatively premature wear.

What if you're plugged in all the time?

While this article is about Windows, the situation is very different on Macs, where Safari completely trounces Chrome 36 in terms of battery life, but also rendering performance and UI responsiveness.

Are you aware of any tests confirming this, or is it just anecdotal?

Mostly anecdotal. It comes up on Reddit pretty often [1], for example this [2] discussion. According to this [3] article, OS X will actually warn about Chrome using too much power, though I haven't seen or heard about that personally.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/user/5HT-2a/m/machelp/search?q=Chrome+...

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/2d2lim/a_thoughtwarning....

[3] http://www.forbes.com/sites/ianmorris/2014/07/21/google-will...

I'm not sure of any official tests, but I often keep Activity Monitor open, and I've noticed Chrome using on average 2x more CPU. Plus, that's excluding the occasional "Google Chrome Helper" that tries to use 95+% of the CPU randomly (even when the app is in the background).

Not that I'm claiming that this is proof that Safari is better than Chrome, but in my experience it uses a fraction of the CPU and gets the same job done.

The "Energy Impact" and "Avg. Energy Impact" columns (also in Activity Monitor) are also helpful for this.

"Optimise for fan noise"

http://prog21.dadgum.com/61.html

Is there an equivalent for mobile browsers? Seems even more relevant there.

Firefox for the last few versions is a constant offender in my battery usage panel in OS X Mavericks. Very disappointing.

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