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

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

#21

Post by thih9 »

concinds wrote: post #4
lilyball wrote: 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.

I’d argue we could replace YouTube with Netflix; or test with more than one streaming platform.

> YouTube accounted for 8.5% of total TV viewing in May, while Netflix was a close second at 7.9%.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/howardhomonoff/2023/06/28/summe...

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

#22

Post by saagarjha »

jeroenhd wrote: post #17
move-on-by wrote: post #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.

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.

Those extensions usually improve performance, no?

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

#23

Post by g_p »

move-on-by wrote: post #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.

One other potential area of variability could come from browser extensions - I imagine that users who compare browser power performance are more technical than the median user, and are more likely to run browser extensions (e.g. ad blockers, etc).

Given Chrome has a larger and more extensive collection of extensions, perhaps users who see differences are running more browser extensions in their Chrome installation, which impacts on performance/power usage?

Certainly interesting to see these assumptions put to the test though, and get some data around them. While it looks like it may have fallen behind again a little, I noticed Firefox's browsing performance on Speedometer caught up for a while, contrary to what I had thought/assumed.

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

#24

Post by fallingsquirrel »

jeroenhd wrote: post #17
move-on-by wrote: post #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.

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.

It seems obvious to me that uBlock Origin uses less battery than an autoplaying video in the corner of every website you visit. So on balance I don't think it's fair to say the addons are the cause.

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

#26

Post by g_p »

saagarjha wrote: post #22
jeroenhd wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those extensions usually improve performance, no?

When browsing a site full of JS-heavy ads, sure.

When running a browser performance benchmark, generally not - the ad block extension adds an overhead to the page. I saw this when experimenting with Orion Browser on Mac, which uses the Webkit engine, but adds support for many Firefox and Chrome web extension APIs.

In experimenting with that, I noticed that enabling extensions and using many extensions during benchmarks could easily impact on scores. Even just an ad blocker like uBO had a measurable impact on a benchmark, from my recollection.

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

#27

Post by grishka »

jokoon wrote: post #18

I wish someone could design HTML6 around performance and good practice It's time to deprecate things

The most serious problem with the web IMO the endless scope creep. Maybe, idk, set a clear goal, work towards it, and then just stop and consider the web "done"?

I hate it so much that almost everything in the IT industry is a process. It's necessarily unending. No one is shipping finished products anymore. Everything is in eternal beta. The web standards are the most egregious example of this.

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

#30

Post by junglistguy »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #15
lol768 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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