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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

#31

Post by leoedin »

Using Chrome on Windows I often find notice my computer fans spinning up when I visit javascript heavy sites - Soundcloud and Google Maps are particularly guilty of this, as are those new media-heavy news stories which embed giant videos right through them. I've sat on some websites (with nothing else open) and watched my battery life fall from ~6 hours to ~2 hours.

Most of these websites gain little from requiring so much processing power. I suspect it's mostly developer laziness.

Chrome has made much of their desire for high performance in recent years, but perhaps they should think about resource utilisation as well! They need to throttle greedy websites.

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

#32

Post by MBCook »

toyg wrote: post #18
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...

There is nothing magic about Safari. People have been complaining for years, the only reason for Chrome to use that much more CPU is that they clearly don't care. Whether they're not telling OS X when they're idle and can sleep or they're using inefficient older APIs or what, Google needs to fix it.

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

#33

Post by maaaats »

zobzu wrote: post #29
josephmx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 8.1 probably makes more sense, I'm not sure how stale a 1 day old OS would be

Specially on a macbook woth notably nbad windows drivers...

A post on HN a few weeks ago showed that Windows 10 preview was smoother than OS X on a MacBook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9555628

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

#34

Post by joshuapants »

zobzu wrote: post #29
josephmx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 8.1 probably makes more sense, I'm not sure how stale a 1 day old OS would be

Specially on a macbook woth notably nbad windows drivers...

I upvoted you because Apple's drivers for Windows are notoriously bad, but the major impact is on user input (trackpad, for example) rather than on performance (in fact, Windows tends to perform better than OS X on a number of tasks on a given hardware configuration) so I think it would still make sense to run the test on Windows on identical hardware.

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

#35

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

jccalhoun wrote: post #20

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.

I wouldn't be surprised if it were the case, though. IE is tailored to Windows, Windows is tailored to IE, so they can optimise for the best power consumption. Like what Apple does with Safari.

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

#37

Post by dang »

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…

Ok, we changed the title in an attempt to make it more accurate. We can change it again if someone suggests a better one.

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

#38

Post by acveilleux »

How much of this is HTML5 related optimization? Some of the worst performing sites like Forbes.com news are also some of the site that wack a video everywhere with an auto-play ad. Using HTML5, that video playback should be hardware assisted and gentle on the battery. Using flash it'll kill the battery.

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

#39

Post by joshstrange »

This doesn't surprise me much (I had long assumed this to be true) but it's also not going to stop me from using chrome on my MBP unless I'm really hurting for battery and even then... Power savings is not something I look for in a browser personally or rather it's so far down my list that it doesn't weigh into my decision. Also I do a lot of web development on my MBP and I GREATLY prefer chrome and it's devtools for that task.
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