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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

#51

Post by jeroenhd »

fallingsquirrel wrote: post #24
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.

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.

With hardware video decoding, video playback is actually remarkably power efficient.

That said, it's been ages since I've last seen an autoplaying video. I only seem to encounter them on American news websites for some reason.

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

#52

Post by grishka »

mschuster91 wrote: post #33
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.

> 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 t…

> Of course they are, the end game is browsers being the OS.

But could we please not do that? Can I do something to prevent this from happening?

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

#53

Post by pjmlp »

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.

As to be expected by anyone on Apple platform since the glory old days, instead of the folks that only know Apple ecosystem as a Linux alternative for UNIX laptops.

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

#54

Post by grishka »

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…

Yes, I miss Flash too.

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

#55

Post by xnyan »

malshe wrote: post #40

> Cards on the table, I’m an Arc guy on the desktop I have used Arc on my M1 MBP a couple of times but don't have enough usage to say anything about its performance. What are its advantages over Safari or Chrome?

It's hard to explain in a comment, but I started off very skeptical of "skinned chromes" like vivaldi, brave, etc before trying and loving arc. In short, I love it's general UI paradigm and it's customizability. In no particular order: command bar as a replacement for the nav bar, 1st class horizontal tabs, great keyboard shortcut support, great multi-profile support and automation, split screen browsing, tab and download management and more. It has some AI features I don't care about, but they are easy to turn off,

I feel much more efficient and fewer barriers to browse the web in a way I grok with Arc. I'd say it's worth an install to try.

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

#57

Post by rblatz »

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.

YouTube is basically unwatchable, I have no idea how people spend so much time on it.

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

#58

Post by GeekyBear »

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.

I think one big issue is that there are OS specific APIs on Windows and Mac that allow you to only redraw the pixels/layers of the web browser window that have changed, with the unchanged portion retained in memory and recomposited.

We've seen versions of Safari and Edge that leverage those sorts of APIs to deliver better battery life on their respective platforms, but if you are writing a cross platform browser you may not be willing to do extra work for each individual platform.

Several years ago, Firefox adopted the solution Chrome used of dividing the web browser window into large-ish sections, so you could at least skip redrawing sections that had not changed, but that still leaves you doing unnecessary work, just less of it.

Prior to that, the battery drain using Firefox vs Safari on newer machines with higher resolution displays was very noticeable.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1422090

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

#59

Post by lilyball »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #9
lilyball wrote: 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?

If a friend sends me a link to youtube, i might click on it to see what the video is, and then close it without watching it. This doesn't happen very often though. If someone gives me a timestamped link and tells me to watch 30s at that spot i'll humor them, but that's about my limit.

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

#60

Post by lilyball »

willsmith72 wrote: post #14
lilyball wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The typical web user is not on a laptop unplugged from the wall, which is the scenario where battery life matters.
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