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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

#81

Post by GeekyBear »

lilyball wrote: post #65
GeekyBear wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We're talking about using features exposed by the OS (the Core Animation layers API in this example) to avoid doing unnecessary work to save battery life.

Any browser could adopt each individual platform's proprietary graphics APIs, but using the same API everywhere (traditionally OpenGL) is less work.

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

#82

Post by TillE »

rblatz wrote: post #57
chrisandchris wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"YouTube", like "Twitter", has never been one thing, one culture. There's a zillion long tail creators making all kinds of unmonetized stuff because they want to.

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

#83

Post by saagarjha »

g_p wrote: post #26
saagarjha wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 benchmar…

Orion is using a web engine that was never really designed to support what they are trying to make it do. Obviously it's just code in the end but a lot of the changes will be made for convenience rather than in ways that make sense if you look at WebKit holistically, because the team is just too small to actually do that. So it is natural that performance suffers.

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

#84

Post by hoistbypetard »

nordsieck wrote: post #44
thih9 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting! Almost all my video watching is on a roku box attached to my TV. I may watch a tiny bit more Youtube than Netflix on my PC or phone, just because people send me links that way, but if the videos they link me are more than a minute or two, usually I'm saving them to "watch later" and catching them on the TV box.

I'd have assumed most people's proportions were similar and that therefore the proportions for the two services were similar; that is to say, for people who use both kinds of devices to watch video, I wouldn't have expected a big difference based on the specific service.

Do you have a source that suggests that people who use both kinds of devices watch a larger proportion of Netflix on the TV but a larger proportion of Youtube on PC?

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

#85

Post by LegionMammal978 »

hoistbypetard wrote: post #46

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…

As I read it, the author performed half the tests with Chrome followed by Safari, and the other half with Safari followed by Chrome, which should have eliminated any first-order bias. Though I agree that the magnitudes of the numbers are aren't really meaningful, short of doing a full 100%-to-0%-SoC discharge with each browser.

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

#86

Post by lern_too_spel »

ajross wrote: post #68
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?

It's pure apologism. The only thing Google has been shown to do is not test on browsers that have lower market share (which I personally don't like as a mobile Firefox user) or to have fewer features on browsers that don't support all the APIs, which would presumably result in longer battery life.

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

#87

Post by frizlab »

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?

I download it with yt-dlp like any sane person should.

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

#88

Post by nazcan »

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.

With what source of revenue?

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

#89

Post by geor9e »

idunnoman1222 wrote: post #56

Why would you use chrome if you have a Mac? I have chrome for the occasional site that doesn’t work, but safari never crashes

My question is why use Safari, other than it being preinstalled? It feels barebones. There must be some reason most Mac users are go out of their way to avoid Safari. ~70% of Mac users use chrome or chromium browsers, versus only 19% who use safari, and 3% who still use firefox [I searched "mac browser market share" and clicked the first link]. My guess is it's the lack of good extensions. People spend a lot of time in the browser, so lack of customizability is frustrating.

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

#90

Post by wmf »

ajross wrote: post #67
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 hav…

What if—I realize this is crazy but hear me out—Chrome actually consumed more power at some point in the past? Why would Google claim that they fixed Chrome if it was never broken?
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