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

birchtree.me

11–20 of 112 posts

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

#13
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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.

I simply cannot remember the last time I watched 90 minutes of YouTube in a 3 hour period. I don't think that activity is representative of typical usage at all!

If I look online for stats relating to use of the YouTube app in the UK, it's 20 hours a month. If that's distributed equally across the month, that's definitely not 1.5 hours in any one sitting.

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

#14
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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.

"A representative sample is a subset of a population that seeks to accurately reflect the characteristics of the larger group"

youtube is always in the top 5 for most time spent and visits. "representative" of the typical web user certainly includes youtube

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

#15
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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

Anti-competitive monopoly behavior. We need to split Chrome out of Alphabet.

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

#16
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I normally look for text alternatives, to be honest. It's not necessarily a bias against YouTube, but more video-based content in general. If I can't find an alternative I'll skim it with subtitles on. I certainly wouldn't have it open for one and half hours in a 3 hour period though!

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

#17

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.

For my use case, it's quite obvious what's draining the battery: addons. Every trick and feature meant to preserve privacy and to remove visual trash will significantly impact load times, responsiveness, and battery life.

It's all worth it to me, but there's no doubt a web without tracking and ads would easily double my battery life.

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

#19
post #13
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.

I simply cannot remember the last time I watched 90 minutes of YouTube in a 3 hour period. I don't think that activity is representative of typical usage at all! If I look online for stats relating to use of the YouTube app in the UK, it's 20 hours a month. If that's distributed equally across the month, that's definitely not 1.5 hours in any one sitting.

Maybe you’re not representative of typical usage.

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

#20
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I know many people do watch YouTube videos but indeed, when a link leads to a YouTube video I don't follow it (and nobody ever just sends me links to YouTube).

I do turn to YouTube if I need some kind of visual guide, like for auto repair sometimes, but it's rare.

Most links to YouTube videos I find are excruciatingly slow explanations of something that could be done in two paragraphs and one screenshot, or some kind of meme that I don't find funny.

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