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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

#101

Post by rebootthesystem »

I am almost always plugged in (desktop or laptop). I don't care about minor differences in power efficiency. I care about speed and memory utilization. It isn't uncommon for me to have multiple browser windows across two or three monitors with 10 to 20 tabs each. Chrome does that flawlessly.

I also care about performance with Selenium.

Energy efficiency has never been a factor for me in, well, decades. Even on a long flight to Europe or Asia I can plug in.

Yes, none of these are consumer-level concerns.

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

#102

Post by hutattedonmyarm »

pax wrote: post #91
ljoshua wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I could run just about everything I needed (notably, 1Password and µBlock) and be very happy with Safari if it weren't for the inexplicable lack of favicons on tabs. There are some SIMBL hacks and such, but I just want that simple feature built in.

What kills it for me is the `Command + number` shortcut - that triggers bookmarks instead of tabs (like in Chrome or FF), a setting that can't be overridden :/

You can change that in Safari settings

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

#103

Post by sobri »

waxjar wrote: post #78
x0054 wrote: post #71

For a long time I have been trying to switch to Safari, but the UI just does not work for my use case. I really need tabs with site icons, and an address bar that goes side to side and does not auto center text. Are there any good alternatives to Safari that also use WebKit? Something that would be more efficient, but with a more traditional interface. To each his own, of course, but it would kill apple to make some…

I like the UI, especially after they adopted Chrome's "don't resize the tabs when the mouse is in the tab bar and the user is closing tabs" feature. The only thing I really miss in Safari is searching websites using a prefix.

For shorthand searches in Safari this works great: http://safarikeywordsearch.aurlien.net

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

#104

Post by ksml »

ArtDev wrote: post #85
melling wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't Don Melton discussed in a number of podcasts that Apple places a priority on energy efficiency? Battery life is a key selling point for Apple devices. Chrome's priorities have simply been different.

Except battery life is really bad on Apple devices. Compared to Samsung at least (my Galaxy Note4 that has a 3-day battery life).

My Note 4 also has a 3 day battery life. I just have to turn it off for 2 days and voila! /s

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

#105

Post by MBCook »

psophis wrote: post #67
MBCook wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is quite a bit of magic that Safari is doing. One example is that it complies javascript down to byte code in LLVM.

That's not magic, Crome could do the same if Google chose.

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

#107

Post by zobzu »

s73v3r wrote: post #64
zobzu wrote: post #30

Its seems the defacto standard is to assume the world runs osx, but windows still is the most installed os. Might be interesting to test the world popular browsers on the most popular os non?

Macbook pros are some of the best selling laptops out there. And this comparison really only makes sense on a laptop, as the power usage wouldn't have a noticeable impact on desktop.

it doesnt matter theyre not windows pcs theyre macosx pcs. its well known the windows mac drivers arent that great.

testing a dell, a lenevo, and the ms surface sounds more like the target for windows doesnt it?

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

#108

Post by zobzu »

joshuapants wrote: post #34
zobzu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

its not about speed its about power. if hardware isnt even instructed to go into sleep mode for example, there will be large differences.. which tends to happen on macbooks running windows.

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

#109

Post by chrisgw »

diminish wrote: post #56
aaronbee wrote: post #40

The Chrome team has been working on power efficiency improvements [1], some of them have gone into the already released Chrome 44. [1] https://plus.google.com/+PeterKasting/posts/GpL63A1K2TF

Eww on emacs is also quite efficient, if power efficiency is a concern for you especially in low battery conditions.

Just make sure you have spacebar heating disabled.

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

#110

Post by tuananh »

sim0n wrote: post #81
x0054 wrote: post #71

For a long time I have been trying to switch to Safari, but the UI just does not work for my use case. I really need tabs with site icons, and an address bar that goes side to side and does not auto center text. Are there any good alternatives to Safari that also use WebKit? Something that would be more efficient, but with a more traditional interface. To each his own, of course, but it would kill apple to make some…

I've also been wanting to switch but god, the Xcode inspired dev tools make me weep in comparison to Chrome's.

I tried so hard but 2 browser: one for browsing and 1 for dev just doesn't work for me.
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