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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

#61

Post by hagbard_c »

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.

While there will be extensions which increase power consumption the opposite is true for the most used category, that being content blockers. A well-tuned uBlock Origin will cut down radically on the number of requests performed per page, the amount of CPU time wasted on non-essential Javascript, the amount of GPU render time wasted on presenting those horrid moving monstrosities called ads and the amount of energy wasted by the user while he waits for the damn page to stop loading.

Never, ever venture out on the web without a content blocker.

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

#62

Post by storafrid »

wtallis wrote: post #43
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?

I don't agree that it's useless either, but I would expect the test macro to match what I do while working: Opening multiple PRs in new tabs all the time, cloud vendor portal tabs, looking through logs and metrics, scrolling (more than watching) some YT video, lots of scrolling and switching of the 15 open tabs, navigating enterprise software portals that are badly written web apps (looking at you, Salesforce)... this is a normal workflow for me and I feel that it questions the crazy in the crazy macro. It also questions the sanity in me, but that's beside the point.

Having a good amount of background processes running (terminal stuff, IDE, Slack, Google Drive, OneDrive, VPN etc. is probably hard to test without introducing more variance, but I can imagine they could play a part. Especially on an 8 GB unified memory MacBook.

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

#63

Post by wtallis »

nordsieck wrote: post #48
wtallis wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't see a way to make it happen, either. But it seems crazy to me that browsers can be adding so much OS-like functionality that's a risk to security or privacy without even attempting to bundle them under a "web app" permission to simplify the user experience of opting in to allowing a domain to do all the things a simple web page doesn't need.

And it's absurd that there's seemingly no way for a Chrome user—even with extensions—to prevent a web page from restyling scrollbars into something unrecognizable.

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

#64

Post by bendhoefs »

GeekyBear wrote: post #58
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…

What are these APIs? Why isn't this possible on standard cross platform graphics APIs?

Edit: I guess it's probably this sort of thing https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/directcomp/a...

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

#65

Post by lilyball »

GeekyBear wrote: post #58
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…

All browser engines are cross-platform. Safari may be Mac-only (though there used to be a Safari for Windows), but the rendering is done by WebKit.

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

#66

Post by Marsymars »

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?

That perfectly describes my behaviour. I don't care for video content. (I similarly don't open tiktok or instagram reel links.)

For a few things I've found where youtube has some specific content I'm interested in, I'll use yt-dlp to download and archive it to watch outside of youtube.com.

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

#67

Post by ajross »

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…

Yeah, there's lots of half-fact nonsense going around in this space.

But really that's the real takeaway here: the reason that "everyone knows" something that was false[1], because no one actually cares about the facts. Modern laptops do extremely well with battery life, Macbooks best among them, and frankly no one is away from a charger for that kind of period in the modern world. You know the thing will always have power, so you never bother to notice or measure what might affect it.

But you still want to argue anyway, if for no better reason than justifying the $3k you dropped on the device, so... "Chrome hurts battery life!" becomes a shibboleth denoting your membership in the right subculture. It doesn't have to be true to do its job.

[1] And, yes, there is a direct analogy to be made here about the current US political debate about immigration. I won't elaborate but I'm sure people see it.

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

#68

Post by ajross »

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.

> Google has been caught in the past letting their sites run worse on Safari than Chrome

Is that... actually true? Or is this just a way of spinning something like "gsheets used a chrome-only extension before it was standardized". Has there been coverage of divergent power draw between chrome and other browsers on google sites?

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

#69

Post by Marsymars »

seszett wrote: post #20
bufferoverflow wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

My current car has a particular enthusiast that has a personal site with detailed text-with-photographs guides to most of the common repairs, and it's awesome.

When I buy my next car I'll probably buy a repair manual to go with it.

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

#70

Post by wiseowise »

lilyball wrote: post #60
willsmith72 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

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

I’m sorry, what? The typical web user is on a phone unplugged from the wall.

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