[HN Gopher] Everyone says Chrome devastates Mac battery life, bu...
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Everyone says Chrome devastates Mac battery life, but does it? 36
hour test
Author : havaloc
Score : 67 points
Date : 2024-09-14 20:01 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (birchtree.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (birchtree.me)
| move-on-by wrote:
| 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Those extensions usually improve performance, no?
| g_p wrote:
| 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 benchmarks
| could easily impact on scores. Even just an ad blocker like
| uBO had a measurable impact on a benchmark, from my
| recollection.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Depends on what sites you visit, but hooking every single
| HTTP call and HTML DOM isn't cheap. I often find websites
| with ads to be just as fast as websites without them, just
| more cluttered, unusable, and more of a privacy nightmare.
| The uBO overhead does seem to impact CPU usage, though.
|
| I'll gladly pay the 15 minutes of battery power spent on
| filtering out that trash.
| fallingsquirrel wrote:
| It seems obvious to me that uBlock Origin uses less battery
| than an autoplaying video in the corner of every website you
| visit. So on balance I don't think it's fair to say the
| addons are the cause.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| With hardware video decoding, video playback is actually
| remarkably power efficient.
|
| That said, it's been ages since I've last seen an
| autoplaying video. I only seem to encounter them on
| American news websites for some reason.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| 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.
| g_p wrote:
| One other potential area of variability could come from browser
| extensions - I imagine that users who compare browser power
| performance are more technical than the median user, and are
| more likely to run browser extensions (e.g. ad blockers, etc).
|
| Given Chrome has a larger and more extensive collection of
| extensions, perhaps users who see differences are running more
| browser extensions in their Chrome installation, which impacts
| on performance/power usage?
|
| Certainly interesting to see these assumptions put to the test
| though, and get some data around them. While it looks like it
| may have fallen behind again a little, I noticed Firefox's
| browsing performance on Speedometer caught up for a while,
| contrary to what I had thought/assumed.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| 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 may not be willing to do extra work for each
| individual platform.
|
| Several years ago, Firefox adopted the solution Chrome used of
| dividing the web browser window into large-ish sections, so you
| could at least skip redrawing sections that had not changed,
| but that still leaves you doing unnecessary work, just less of
| it.
|
| Prior to that, the battery drain using Firefox vs Safari on
| newer machines with higher resolution displays was very
| noticeable.
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1422090
| bendhoefs wrote:
| 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...
| GeekyBear wrote:
| On the Mac, it's the Core Animation layers API.
| lilyball wrote:
| 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.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| We're talking about using features exposed by the OS (the
| Core Animation layers API in MacOS) to avoid doing
| unnecessary work to save battery life.
|
| Any browser could use this platform specific API, but using
| the same API everywhere (traditionally OpenGL) is less
| work.
| lilyball wrote:
| 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.
| concinds wrote:
| G Docs, alright, _maybe_ , but any web battery test that
| doesn't involve YouTube simply wouldn't be representative.
| lilyball wrote:
| Representative of who? Not me, certainly, I don't use
| YouTube.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| 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?
| lol768 wrote:
| I normally look for text alternatives, to be honest. It's
| not necessarily a bias against _YouTube_ , but more
| video-based content in general. If I can't find an
| alternative I'll skim it with subtitles on. I certainly
| wouldn't have it open for one and half hours in a 3 hour
| period though!
| seszett wrote:
| 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 of meme that
| I don't find funny.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > 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.
| lilyball wrote:
| If a friend sends me a link to youtube, i might click on
| it to see what the video is, and then close it without
| watching it. This doesn't happen very often though. If
| someone gives me a timestamped link and tells me to watch
| 30s at that spot i'll humor them, but that's about my
| limit.
| Marsymars wrote:
| 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.
| tedunangst wrote:
| https://theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-
| doesn...
| willsmith72 wrote:
| "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
| lilyball wrote:
| The typical web user is not on a laptop unplugged from
| the wall, which is the scenario where battery life
| matters.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > 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.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| "Representative" means of a population.
|
| "Representative for me" is incoherent. You're not a
| population; you don't have population statistics.
| rblatz wrote:
| YouTube is basically unwatchable, I have no idea how people
| spend so much time on it.
| wtallis wrote:
| A follow-up test to investigate whether Google sites are more
| power-hungry than similar non-Google sites does not have to
| be representative of general web browsing patterns, because
| the original test already addressed that question.
| lol768 wrote:
| I simply cannot remember the last time I watched 90 minutes
| of YouTube in a 3 hour period. I don't think that activity is
| representative of typical usage at all!
|
| If I look online for stats relating to use of the YouTube app
| in the UK, it's 20 hours a month. If that's distributed
| equally across the month, that's definitely not 1.5 hours in
| any one sitting.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Maybe you're not representative of typical usage.
| thih9 wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| lolinder wrote:
| This article isn't about streaming activity in general,
| it's about the Nielsen ratings, which as far as I can tell
| wouldn't include views on creators like MrBeast, just
| proper 'television'.
| nordsieck wrote:
| >> 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.
| lol768 wrote:
| 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
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Anti-competitive monopoly behavior. We need to split Chrome
| out of Alphabet.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| One man's dirty tricks is another man's progress.
|
| Of course Google is using their own browser to showcase
| whatever new shit they have developed, or they expand Chrome
| when one of their properties needs some sort of new feature.
| It's been quite a while that there was innovation in the
| browser scene from anyone _but_ Chrome... to the contrary,
| over the last years a lot either gave up entirely or went
| under Chromium. Including _Microsoft_.
| ajross wrote:
| > 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?
| jokoon wrote:
| I wish someone could design HTML6 around performance and good
| practice
|
| It's time to deprecate things
| meindnoch wrote:
| Ok, here's the new HTML6 standard: Everything
| is the same as HTML5, but scripts are not allowed.
| thih9 wrote:
| If recent history is any indicator, then we would reimplement
| react with iframes and "meta http-equiv='refresh'
| content='1'" somehow.
| grishka wrote:
| The most serious problem with the web IMO the endless scope
| creep. Maybe, idk, set a clear goal, work towards it, and then
| just stop and consider the web "done"?
|
| I hate it so much that almost everything in the IT industry is
| a _process_. It 's necessarily unending. No one is shipping
| _finished products_ anymore. Everything is in eternal beta. The
| web standards are the most egregious example of this.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The web standards are the most egregious example of this.
|
| Of course they are, the end game is browsers being the OS.
| But it's way too risky to give web sites direct unfettered
| access to the computer (ActiveX, remember the time and the
| many ways you could be fucked by that?), so a loooot of stuff
| has to be built as abstractions. WebGL/WebGPU, WebUSB,
| WebSerial, WebBluetooth... the only thing I'm still pissed
| about that didn't make the cut is WebSQL - IndexedDB and
| localStorage just suck in comparison to a proper SQL shell.
| grishka wrote:
| > Of course they are, the end game is browsers being the
| OS.
|
| But could we please not do that? Can I do something to
| prevent this from happening?
| wtallis wrote:
| 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 apps should be something the end user opts-in
| to using.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > 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 that genie back in the bottle.
| Not when there are so many designers that override the
| scrollbar for aesthetics.
|
| For the record, I'm with you - I think it would be great if
| most websites ran on gopher 2.0 that used markdown for its
| syntax. I just don't think it'll happen.
| wtallis wrote:
| 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.
| grishka wrote:
| Yes, I miss Flash too.
| minkles wrote:
| My Mac battery is considerably more amazing than its default
| amazing state when I don't have _any_ browser open or any
| Electron crud running.
|
| I blame the modern web. The browser is just the universe it runs
| in.
| lapcat wrote:
| > 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 energy-efficient system version of WebKit."
| https://daringfireball.net/2024/09/ios_continental_drift_fun...
| stavros wrote:
| I didn't realize John Gruber had reached "cult leader" levels
| of apologism.
| nordsieck wrote:
| He's been that way for at least 10 years, from what I can
| tell.
| stavros wrote:
| I guess that explains why it's been about that long that I
| read something of his.
| pjmlp wrote:
| As to be expected by anyone on Apple platform since the glory
| old days, instead of the folks that only know Apple ecosystem
| as a Linux alternative for UNIX laptops.
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| He's a total bootlicker shill. His takes are often dishonest
| and ignorant. He's not officially an Apple employee but he's
| effectively "second party". His access to insiders is
| predicated on his subservience. He doesn't get an annual WWDC
| stage interview with Craig Federighi without bending the
| knee.
|
| That said, I still read Daring Fireball every week. His takes
| may be super biased and wrong, but it's still useful to read
| things from that perspective.
| lxgr wrote:
| I have to admit that it's somewhat of a hate follow for me
| as well.
|
| People talking themselves into violently agreeing that yes,
| being able to run Game Boy emulators and Firefox on their
| iPhones is unequivocally bad is something to behold and
| shows how far in space and time the RDF really reaches.
| ajross wrote:
| 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.
| lxgr wrote:
| Half-fact is being too generous, in my view.
|
| Remember "Chrome is bad"? (As proven by the empirical method
| of "I deleted a bunch of Google named things and now not only
| does my laptop run cooler, my laundry uses less water as
| well!")
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| this "test" sounds pretty useless, and to immediately try to
| extrapolate the small sample to an eight hour battery life, lol
| wtallis wrote:
| 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?
| storafrid wrote:
| 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.
| malshe wrote:
| > Cards on the table, I'm an Arc guy on the desktop
|
| I have used Arc on my M1 MBP a couple of times but don't have
| enough usage to say anything about its performance. What are its
| advantages over Safari or Chrome?
| xnyan wrote:
| It's hard to explain in a comment, but I started off very
| skeptical of "skinned chromes" like vivaldi, brave, etc before
| trying and loving arc. In short, I love it's general UI
| paradigm and it's customizability. In no particular order:
| command bar as a replacement for the nav bar, 1st class
| horizontal tabs, great keyboard shortcut support, great multi-
| profile support and automation, split screen browsing, tab and
| download management and more. It has some AI features I don't
| care about, but they are easy to turn off,
|
| I feel much more efficient and fewer barriers to browse the web
| in a way I grok with Arc. I'd say it's worth an install to try.
| peterbmarks wrote:
| The test is dominated by YouTube watching which presumably Google
| Chrome is particularly optimised for.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| 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 to put together ~40
| hours worth of testing similar to what the author did, then run
| it with Safari until the battery dies, charge the machine for X
| hours (where X is the amount of time the battery takes to report
| 100% plus some margin) then run it with Chrome until the battery
| dies. Repeat as many times as you think necessary.
|
| That would take battery percentage remaining reporting out of any
| load bearing place, which I believe is absolutely necessary here.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| 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
| wiseowise wrote:
| Why would you use either of those when there's Firefox?
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| People use it for the google account integration. Logged in to
| all services, all history/bookmarks/tabs/passwords syncs over.
| relaxing wrote:
| I guess that makes sense. Safari iCloud integration is super
| convenient for syncing everything to my phone etc.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| Instead of YouTube and Google Docs, maybe it could be Netflix and
| Notion?
| prmoustache wrote:
| Or the whole atlassian suite, github and teams + a single
| linkedin tab.
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