Does Google Chrome Still Devastate Mac Battery Life?

I still use Safari at home on Mojave, because I have a dozen or so tabs that have been (mostly) open for the last five years, and use Chrome at work. Unfortunately, I regularly encounter sites that don't work in that old Safari (Territorial Seed Co. being a recent example), and will probably end up switching entirely to Chrome. Even though Chrome for Mojave is also old/unsupported, it's more functional, although I haven't paid attention to battery usage.

I replied to Matt on Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@rcarmo/113141420589033772

The gist of my reply is that I don’t consider automated testing reliable for this since there are things like tab throttling and the like that rely on human input (like moving your mouse across, switching tabs, etc.) and scripting simply won’t generate comparable results. In my experience, Chromium/Edge tries to be input responsive to a fault, and just moving your pointer around a tab will trigger DOM events (as just one example). I’ve also found it to be more energy intensive in general (due to different caching policies and rendering features).

But what other red herring will Gruner use now to “argue” against EU regulation?

I think the vast majority of "compatibility" problems are actually iCloud Private Relay. It has been getting more and more unreliable lately as more and more sites are using Cloudflare protection.

@Brad I don’t use iCloud Private Relay, and the compatibility problems I’ve seen predate it, but certainly it could be the cause of some people’s problems.

Nope. Not true. You know how I know? The most reliable narrator in the universe, Mr. John Gruber, has told us otherwise. Repeatedly. And let’s be real, he always acts in good faith and is hands down the most trustworthy journalist on the face of the planet. If John has taught us all one thing, it’s that this misinformation is definitely the fault of the EU and Tim Sweeney.

AFAIK the biggest reason for Chrome's reputation for destroying the battery comes from the first 16" MacBook Pro (2019). All dual-GPU machines (starting with the first 15" Retina in 2012, IIRC) have some heuristics for deciding when to switch to the dedicated GPU. The way Chrome created graphics buffers triggered the switch right away, even for simple webpages. And the 16" model had truly horrendous drivers that caused the dGPU to overheat even when doing basically nothing — therefore your machine would run hot and have fans at full blast simply for opening Chrome.

I don't think the heuristics for dGPU were ever documented, and the fault for the inefficient drivers lies entirely with Apple and AMD, since the drivers were bundled with the OS. Seems quite unfair to blame Google for a fuckup that was entirely outside of their control and that had no guaranteed way to avoid — the best one could do was "avoid triggering today's heuristics and pray they won't change in a future release".

(BTW, there were lots of other ways to trigger the dGPU, like connecting an external display — I remember my 16" losing 70% of its battery playing a 20-minute show on a TV over HDMI)

Damn, you people have got Gruber living rent-free in your heads.

@Someone else
Gruber just commented on this exact issue. Follow the blog here if you want to know more, but he's been harping on Chrome and battery life for years and he literally just threw a tantrum about native Chrome on iOS being the death knell of the platform. He's a partisan ass who traded in credibility for page clicks, but he still gets a lot of attention for some reason anyway.

In all honesty, without Apple barring competition on iOS, I think Safari would be largely dead. Even when I used Mac OS, I long ago gave up on Safari. I wish Opera was still Opera and not the horror amalgamation it has become. That's the one I really miss. And Camino actually. Sigh…

Ps iCab was always a better Safari than Safari frankly.

"Damn, you people have got Gruber living rent-free in your heads."

Just like you have all of us living rent-free in your head. I like it here, a bit weird, some leaky thoughts, but pretty cozy overall, and the rollercoaster of wild ideas is a nice addition.

Safari is pretty bad for me with multiple *heavy* windows/tabs (heavy = google maps or shitty JS sites, multiple=~5 windows, ~30 tabs).

The sad part is there’s no alternative really, in my opinion. I don’t trust Google at all, so Chrome is a no-go. Edge (which I am forced to use on my work laptop) is a joke, riddled with Microsoft’s crap (wallets, coupons, AI). Firefox doesn’t integrate nicely with macOS (look up in dictionary).

Is not clear to me why general users want to corner themselves by promoting just one web browser. That is free but comes from the very corp dominating the digital advertising market, strongly suggesting what to choose, and the internet search market, with the same finality.

Safari is OS optimized. And has Active Tracking Prevention. The most important feature of a modern web browser. Whoever says otherwise is either ill informed, all retail users are, or has vested interests at promoting Google quasi monopoly.

Chrome's battery saver mode prevents trashing with 20 tabs open on my 8 GB Intel Mac (a configuration which probably represents around a third of Macs in active use). The elegant MacOS–Safari technical integration is no match, the experience is junk.

Safari’s UI slowness is also remarkable for me. And if your network is slow the address bar/current page can get into confused states, like you would have with a typical JavaScript single-page application.

UI bugs also get introduced with most new major Safari versions. Same cycle as MacOS, except it's mandatory to install them as soon as they're released if you want security fixes.

@Wu Ming
If Safari is so optimized, why is it such a poor experience to use it? I tried to run Safari as a primary browser for over a decade, maybe it's much better now, but that's not what I see from comments from many users.

Also, was your concern about a monoculture present when Chrome was still Webkit based or is it only a problem now after Google forked it to Blink and Safari was left in the dust (excepting Apple's illegal monopoly on web browsers on iOS of course).

Once upon a time Apple users had a lot of choice in browsers from Gecko based, to Trident based, to Presto based, to iCab's custom engine, etc. Then Safari brought Webkit to the platform after forking KHTML (the people we should really be celebrating of course are the developers of KHTML, but I digress). Then almost every browser not based on Webkit was killed off. Besides Firefox. Because remember, Chrome was once Webkit as well. I thought it sucked we lost the diversity in choice on the platform but Apple's users sure seemed fine with it.

And to repeat, I don't use Chrome on Android, I don't use Chrome on Linux. I largely use Firefox remixes like Mull on Android and Waterfox on Linux. I do love me some Vivaldi as well, and I would use Brave more if the leadership wasn't hellbent on destroying the products with stupid forays into crypto. I don't like Chrome, but I'm mostly okay with Chromium itself. Maybe Safari should compete better. Only one of the largest companies in the world backing it.

Firefox is not WebKit-based, it’s Gecko-based.

When things run faster, it’s usually because they’re using more resources… memory, cpu, etc.

Everyone says Chrome is faster (presumably on the same hardware)… so do the math.

Safari is, ironically, keeping the web standards-based.

If it wasn’t for safari/webkit, Chrome would be the new IE ( but now controlled by the worlds biggest advertising company.)

@Someone else
I know it's Gecko, hence, "Then almost every browser not based on Webkit was killed off. Besides Firefox." Notice the "not based" part. Trident, dead. Presto, dead. Gecko embedded, dead (to be fair, that was actually Mozilla's fault, but I still miss Camino). Firefox stuck around, but pretty much everything else became Webkit based. Then when Google forked Webkit, most of the browsers went over to Blink instead. Although, I know iCab is still Webkit as one example. Believe me, I used a plethora of different web browsers on the Mac alone back then. Dozen easily. Probably more. Currently, I have two different builds of Firefox on this computer alone. Waterfox and Firefox. I know they use Gecko, well, used maybe, Quantum is what they use now, right? Don't want this misconception to distract from the larger point:

Chrome isn't the new IE because it is actively developed. iOS has no competition for web browsers historically so Safari's presence in the market isn't dictating anything from that perspective anyway. However, the main point is when IE "won", MS kind of stopped developing their web browsers for years, hence why Firefox came around and ate their lunch (shoutout to Opera for a valiant effort, boy do I miss the Presto versions). Chrome has arguably won, yet Google keeps rolling out development year after year. Funny how that works, right? While Safari has largely stagnated, but you know…

Again, for those Apple only advocates, was the concern about a web monoculture a problem when Apple was leading the monoculture, aka Webkit? If not, then maybe take a breather on the whole Blink thing. Again, I use Firefox mostly, so not much Webkit nor Blink for me. That goes for mobile and desktop computing. So no dog in this fight really. And if I do use Blink, it's always the non Google versions, yes, even on Android. Funny how competition actually works when it's on a platform that allows it.