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

&gt; 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.<p>The subtext is John Gruber&#x27;s post 6 days ago, defending Apple&#x27;s iOS lockdown: &quot;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.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;2024&#x2F;09&#x2F;ios_continental_drift_fun_gap" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;daringfireball.net&#x2F;2024&#x2F;09&#x2F;ios_continental_drift_fun...</a>

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&#x27;d really like to see this test done without having a single Google property be involved.

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%.”<p>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.<p>That would take battery percentage remaining reporting out of any load bearing place, which I believe is absolutely necessary here.

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.

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

I guess most people dont follow browser development anymore.<p>We are now in 2024.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 )

I wish someone could design HTML6 around performance and good practice<p>It&#x27;s time to deprecate things

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

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

&gt; Cards on the table, I’m an Arc guy on the desktop<p>I have used Arc on my M1 MBP a couple of times but don&#x27;t have enough usage to say anything about its performance. What are its advantages over Safari or Chrome?

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

He didn&#x27;t mention an ad blocker. I wonder if that would change things.<p>Especially if (like me) he&#x27;s got an ad blocker in Chrome but not in Safari.

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

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

My Mac battery is considerably more amazing than its default amazing state when I don&#x27;t have <i>any</i> browser open or any Electron crud running.<p>I blame the modern web. The browser is just the universe it runs in.

check &quot;ungoogled chrome&quot;, it&#x27;s awesome.