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Safari is more energy-efficient than Chrome and Firefox on OS X

blog.getbatterybox.com

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Re: Safari is more energy-efficient than Chrome and Firefox on OS X

#11

Post by mkozlows »

andreasley wrote: post #8

Note that these tests were conducted on a MacBook – presumably running OS X. Apple invested a lot of time optimizing Safari and OS X for low power usage, so it's not exactly surprising that Safari wins in most cases. It would be very interesting the see a comparison with Windows and Linux (if possible on the same hardware).

Yeah, it'd be a lot more interesting to see results for Linux and Windows, too.

The test that'd be the most interesting to me is actually Chrome on ChromeOS vs. Chrome and Firefox on Linux on the same hardware. My subjective impression from using ChromeOS is that it's much faster and more efficient than Chrome on other platforms, but I'm curious if that's really true.

Re: Safari is more energy-efficient than Chrome and Firefox on OS X

#12

Post by TheCowboy »

andreasley wrote: post #8

Note that these tests were conducted on a MacBook – presumably running OS X. Apple invested a lot of time optimizing Safari and OS X for low power usage, so it's not exactly surprising that Safari wins in most cases. It would be very interesting the see a comparison with Windows and Linux (if possible on the same hardware).

I wouldn't be surprised either, but the methodology for the testing doesn't seem to be fully explained, so it might lack rigor. Is it a fresh install of the OS? Are all of the caches and histories clean? What plugins are enabled?

Performance can vary based on how you configure your browser and what extensions you have enabled. I get less battery using Chrome, but it's configured in a way that I think is a superior experience, and most of the time my notebook is plugged in.

There might be unsurprising trade-offs between speed and battery life. (And if you get things done faster, does that offset the drain?) For me, usually time, not battery life, is the most scarce resource. Obviously I'd prefer to have more of both.

Re: Safari is more energy-efficient than Chrome and Firefox on OS X

#13

Post by jacquesm »

FroshKiller wrote: post #2

I found this title misleading. I thought this would be an article about how much power is consumed by the browsers of visitors to popular sites, e.g. the energy footprint of one day of Reddit's users based on the length of time of the average daily visit and how much battery each of the major browsers consumes in that time or something. What it's actually about is how much power is consumed by different browsers usin…

Browsers can influence the power usage of a computer but just having the thing on all day is a significant base load that needs to be met. Compared to that the websites that you visit likely have relatively little effect as long as the pages don't contain javascript that keeps on running, video or animated content.

How much difference there is between browsers then becomes a function of the different base-loads for the various OS's + the base load of using the browser in the first place + the efficiency of the rendering engine when rendering the pages under test.

Finding the power usage of the browser alone is going to be very difficult since you can't really run a browser without an OS and the various bits and pieces of hardware in the laptop which are not necessarily direclty related to running the browser.

Re: Safari is more energy-efficient than Chrome and Firefox on OS X

#14

Post by TD-Linux »

TheCowboy wrote: post #12
andreasley wrote: post #8

Note that these tests were conducted on a MacBook – presumably running OS X. Apple invested a lot of time optimizing Safari and OS X for low power usage, so it's not exactly surprising that Safari wins in most cases. It would be very interesting the see a comparison with Windows and Linux (if possible on the same hardware).

I wouldn't be surprised either, but the methodology for the testing doesn't seem to be fully explained, so it might lack rigor. Is it a fresh install of the OS? Are all of the caches and histories clean? What plugins are enabled? Performance can vary based on how you configure your browser and what extensions you have enabled. I get less battery using Chrome, but it's configured in a way that I think is a superior ex…

Yes, I'd also like to know the status of Flash in particular. However, they were pretty clear about the methodology of their test - their Macbook was factory-restored, they measured power using current measurement at the DC input and integrating over time, and all of the tests were automated usage. It's certainly the best power analysis that I've seen posted to HN in a while.

I'd love to see more of this in the future - a lot of tech gets thrown around on HN for its power efficiency, (GPU acceleration, media decoders, even different CSS animation types) and it would be nice to have actual numbers.

Re: Safari is more energy-efficient than Chrome and Firefox on OS X

#15

Post by daenney »

TheCowboy wrote: post #12
andreasley wrote: post #8

Note that these tests were conducted on a MacBook – presumably running OS X. Apple invested a lot of time optimizing Safari and OS X for low power usage, so it's not exactly surprising that Safari wins in most cases. It would be very interesting the see a comparison with Windows and Linux (if possible on the same hardware).

I wouldn't be surprised either, but the methodology for the testing doesn't seem to be fully explained, so it might lack rigor. Is it a fresh install of the OS? Are all of the caches and histories clean? What plugins are enabled? Performance can vary based on how you configure your browser and what extensions you have enabled. I get less battery using Chrome, but it's configured in a way that I think is a superior ex…

A little down the article:

> We used a factory-restored MacBook Pro Retina 13” to test each website on one internet browser at a time. No programs other than the browser were open.

I'm pretty sure a factory resetted Mac is a fresh install and that it won't have any caches or history. And since they don't mention plugins I'm going to make a wild assumption here and say they didn't install any after having loaded up the browsers on the machine.

Re: Safari is more energy-efficient than Chrome and Firefox on OS X

#17

Post by stephengillie »

andreasley wrote: post #8

Note that these tests were conducted on a MacBook – presumably running OS X. Apple invested a lot of time optimizing Safari and OS X for low power usage, so it's not exactly surprising that Safari wins in most cases. It would be very interesting the see a comparison with Windows and Linux (if possible on the same hardware).

Lots of other commenters have remarked about the lacking rigor and narrow scope of the tests. It would be interesting (and time consuming) to re-run this test with many more parameters:

  * Fresh install of OSX vs fresh install of Win8.1/Win10 on capable Macbook. (I'm unsure about Linux or other distros running on Macbooks, add that to the test if it's feasible.)
  * Javascript enabled and disabled.
  * Flash enabled and disabled. As well as Silverlight and other media players.
  * Various adblockers, tracking blockers, and content filters (like Adblock vs Adblock Plus vs uBlock vs uBlock origin, etc. And uMatrix and Ghostery et al.) This could become its own research project.
  * Logged into tracking sites (e.g. Facebook) vs logged out.
Maybe this testing could be automated with Puppet/Chef?

Edit: Windows 10 would be a definite option instead of Win8.1. I was unaware Win10 would operate on a Macbook, but in retrospect I suppose there's no reason it wouldn't.

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Note that high-power-consuming sites also consume more electricity on desktop PCs; this is less of a concern because they are on a constantly-replenished power system. The concern may be closer to that for CFL vs incandescent lights, where we can make a few changes to the system and make it vastly more efficient, multiplied by a large userbase.

Re: Safari is more energy-efficient than Chrome and Firefox on OS X

#18

Post by toyg »

andreasley wrote: post #8

Note that these tests were conducted on a MacBook – presumably running OS X. Apple invested a lot of time optimizing Safari and OS X for low power usage, so it's not exactly surprising that Safari wins in most cases. It would be very interesting the see a comparison with Windows and Linux (if possible on the same hardware).

Agree. My experience matches the test, but that's not surprising: I'm sure Office runs better on Windows, too...

Re: Safari is more energy-efficient than Chrome and Firefox on OS X

#19

Post by nine_k »

condescendence wrote: post #7

The title thing is funny, if you look at the URL it's a more accurate title. Power consumption of the worlds most popular websites calculated on different browsers – Chrome vs Safari vs Firefox vs http://blog.getbatterybox.com/which-browser-is-the-most-ener... __ Title aside, very interesting article I'd like to see what factors play into these huge disparities of battery life loss between the different browsers.

I suppose that just displaying a page and scrolling around it consumes little energy, with a short spike during the layout phase.

What really consumes energy is compiling and executing Javascript, and playing animations (flash, gif, css, video). JS engines of all three browsers are likely different. I also suspect that Safari, being essentially single-platform, can afford platform-specific optimizations (e.g cheaper non-public API calls).

Re: Safari is more energy-efficient than Chrome and Firefox on OS X

#20

Post by jccalhoun »

Microsoft paid for a similar study a couple years ago. http://blogs.windows.com/ie/2013/06/05/internet-explorer-10-...

IE was found to be the most energy efficient. Of course, since MS paid for the study it might not be the least biased study ever done.

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