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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

#41

Post by nordsieck »

stavros wrote: post #39
lapcat wrote: 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.

He's been that way for at least 10 years, from what I can tell.

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

#43

Post by wtallis »

turtlesdown11 wrote: post #38

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

Are there any specific shortcomings you think render this test "useless"? It doesn't seem at all unreasonable to extrapolate from a 3-hour test repeated six times to estimate power usage over an 8+ hour span. Or is the "small sample" you refer to the 20-minute inner loop?

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

#44

Post by nordsieck »

thih9 wrote: post #21
concinds wrote: 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...

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

Assuming that's true, I still don't think it matters that much.

I expect that a very large proportion of Netflix that's watched is watched on a smart TV. Much larger than the proportion of Youtube that's watched on a TV.

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

#45

Post by stavros »

nordsieck wrote: post #41
stavros wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

He's been that way for at least 10 years, from what I can tell.

I guess that explains why it's been about that long that I read something of his.

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

#46

Post by hoistbypetard »

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%.”

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.

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

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

#47

Post by jeroenhd »

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?

Depends on what sites you visit, but hooking every single HTTP call and HTML DOM isn't cheap. I often find websites with ads to be just as fast as websites without them, just more cluttered, unusable, and more of a privacy nightmare. The uBO overhead does seem to impact CPU usage, though.

I'll gladly pay the 15 minutes of battery power spent on filtering out that trash.

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

#48

Post by nordsieck »

wtallis wrote: post #37
grishka wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> 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.

I don't see people putting that genie back in the bottle. Not when there are so many designers that override the scrollbar for aesthetics.

For the record, I'm with you - I think it would be great if most websites ran on gopher 2.0 that used markdown for its syntax. I just don't think it'll happen.

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

#49

Post by crazygringo »

chrisandchris wrote: post #7
concinds wrote: 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 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.

"Representative" means of a population.

"Representative for me" is incoherent. You're not a population; you don't have population statistics.

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

#50

Post by [deleted] »

wtallis wrote: post #37
grishka wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

[deleted]
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