{"id":28679,"date":"2020-04-17T15:23:52","date_gmt":"2020-04-17T19:23:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=28679"},"modified":"2023-06-19T10:10:20","modified_gmt":"2023-06-19T14:10:20","slug":"chrome-vs-safari-energy-use-and-compatibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/04\/17\/chrome-vs-safari-energy-use-and-compatibility\/","title":{"rendered":"Chrome vs. Safari: Energy Use and Compatibility"},"content":{"rendered":"

Walt Mossberg<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

If you use a Mac, and you insist on using Chrome, stop complaining about speed, fan noise, or battery life. It’s well known that Chrome is a resource and battery hog, especially on Macs. Safari is fully capable, quite fast and very privacy & security focused. Just use Safari.<\/p>\n

If you’re a Firefox fan, that’s good too. My point is just that Chrome, which years ago worked great on Macs, is now a big problem, and that Chrome users with degraded Mac performance or weaker battery life should look to their browser choice, and not blame the hardware.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Safari is generally<\/em> capable, but I’ve been increasingly running into compatibility problems. I think it’s fair to say that if your top priority is a Mac browser that works with the most sites, you should pick Chrome, followed by Firefox. I have other priorities, so I’m still using Safari. But lately it feels like a compromise to get a good Mac app and privacy. It used to feel like I was simply getting the best browser.<\/p>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

It’s also funny how angry some Chrome fans are about this, particularly web developers. They argue that the problem is that Safari is slow to adopt Chrome-first web technologies without acknowledging that the reason Safari has better performance and stronger privacy goes hand-in-hand with the fact that these technologies Safari hasn’t adopted are resource-heavy and potentially privacy-invasive.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

I don’t think it’s that simple. First, performance and privacy aside, Apple has a strategic interest in some of these technologies not taking off. Or, more charitably, it makes sense that they wouldn’t be high priorities to implement.<\/p>\n

Second, the compatibility issues I’m seeing are not, as far as I can tell, because of new technologies that Safari doesn’t support yet. Rather, the engines are diverging such that even older technologies don’t behave consistently. Unfortunately, some sites don’t adequately test with Safari.<\/p>\n

Third, I thought the idea was that Safari’s efficiency comes not just from absent features but also from more efficient implementations of the common features. But even that is not clear-cut. Recently, as we physically isolate, we’ve been doing board game nights online at Board Game Arena<\/a>. It’s amazing how many games this site supports and how well they work in a browser. But what really surprised me was how much better it performs in Chrome. The 7 Wonders game was almost unusable on my iMac in Safari, with multi-second pauses and animations that lost so many frames I couldn’t see what was happening. The fans were always running at full blast. Meanwhile, on my wife’s 2018 MacBook Air, which I normally find a bit pokey, the animations were smooth and the fans were silent. The difference is that she uses Chrome. Once I fired up Chrome on the iMac, the site worked great there, too.<\/p>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n