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

birchtree.me

31–40 of 112 posts

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

#31
post #18

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

Ok, here's the new HTML6 standard: Everything is the same as HTML5, but scripts are not allowed.

If recent history is any indicator, then we would reimplement react with iframes and “meta http-equiv=‘refresh’ content=‘1’” somehow.

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

#32
post #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

One man's dirty tricks is another man's progress.

Of course Google is using their own browser to showcase whatever new shit they have developed, or they expand Chrome when one of their properties needs some sort of new feature. It's been quite a while that there was innovation in the browser scene from anyone but Chrome... to the contrary, over the last years a lot either gave up entirely or went under Chromium. Including Microsoft.

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

#33
post #27
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.

> The web standards are the most egregious example of this.

Of course they are, the end game is browsers being the OS. But it's way too risky to give web sites direct unfettered access to the computer (ActiveX, remember the time and the many ways you could be fucked by that?), so a loooot of stuff has to be built as abstractions. WebGL/WebGPU, WebUSB, WebSerial, WebBluetooth... the only thing I'm still pissed about that didn't make the cut is WebSQL - IndexedDB and localStorage just suck in comparison to a proper SQL shell.

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

#35
> 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.

The subtext is John Gruber's post 6 days ago, defending Apple's iOS lockdown: "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." https://daringfireball.net/2024/09/ios_continental_drift_fun...

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

#36
post #21
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’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...

This article isn't about streaming activity in general, it's about the Nielsen ratings, which as far as I can tell wouldn't include views on creators like MrBeast, just proper 'television'.

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

#37
post #27
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.

I think what we need is not an HTML6, but rather HTML4-ish and something separate. I want web pages and web apps to be distinguishable, and not have every newspaper article and blog post hosted inside of a heavyweight application framework that either breaks or re-implements all kinds of basic user agent functionality. Simple pages should be implemented in a simple, constrained technology stack and heavyweight web apps should be something the end user opts-in to using.

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

#39
post #35

> 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. The subtext is John Gruber's post 6 days ago, defending Apple's iOS lockdown: "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 en…

I didn't realize John Gruber had reached "cult leader" levels of apologism.
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