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

birchtree.me

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

#2
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.

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

#4
post #3

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'd really like to see this test done without having a single Google property be involved.

G Docs, alright, maybe, but any web battery test that doesn't involve YouTube simply wouldn't be representative.

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

#5
post #4
post #3

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'd really like to see this test done without having a single Google property be involved.

G Docs, alright, maybe , but any web battery test that doesn't involve YouTube simply wouldn't be representative.

Representative of who? Not me, certainly, I don't use YouTube.

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

#6
post #3

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'd really like to see this test done without having a single Google property be involved.

Agree with this. As soon as it became apparent a large proportion of battery usage would be dominated by the YouTube activity, I became suspicious. It's not just Safari where we've seen Google playing dirty tricks either. Back in 2018 it was this:

> YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome

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

#7
post #4
post #3

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'd really like to see this test done without having a single Google property be involved.

G Docs, alright, maybe , but any web battery test that doesn't involve YouTube simply wouldn't be representative.

Representative for who?

I haven't been longer than 15 minutes on YouTube - in total within the past 2 years. So certainly not representative for me.

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

#8
post #4
post #3

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'd really like to see this test done without having a single Google property be involved.

G Docs, alright, maybe , but any web battery test that doesn't involve YouTube simply wouldn't be representative.

A follow-up test to investigate whether Google sites are more power-hungry than similar non-Google sites does not have to be representative of general web browsing patterns, because the original test already addressed that question.

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

#9
post #5
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

G Docs, alright, maybe , but any web battery test that doesn't involve YouTube simply wouldn't be representative.

Representative of who? Not me, certainly, I don't use YouTube.

So when some interesting link leads to a youtube video, or someone sends a link to youtube directly to you, you just don't open it?
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