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

http://blog.getbatterybox.com/which-browser-is-the-most-energy-efficient-chrome-vs-safari-vs-firefox/

by timsher • 11 years ago

156 108 11 years ago

blog.getbatterybox.com

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 using popular websites on one machine. That isn't actually as interesting as I'd hoped.

MBCook3• 11 years ago

Really? I think it's well known that Chrome isn't nearly as efficient as Safari but I'm amazed just how big the difference between some websites is. Some sites are worse on all browsers, but I wasn't expecting the effect to be by hours.

So you look a site like Mashable and with Safari you're getting 1/3 the battery life of Cult of Mac. That's crazy.

But then on a few sites things are really nuts. What is going on with Forbes where Chrome's battery life is 50% what Firefox and Safari get? Something is going on there.

This was neat to see.

jacquesm• 11 years ago

Browsers can influence the power usage of a computer but just having the thing on all day is a significant base load that needs to be met. Compared to that the websites that you visit likely have relatively little effect as long as the pages don't contain javascript that keeps on running, video or animated content.

How much difference there is between browsers then becomes a function of the different base-loads for the various OS's + the base load of using the browser in the first place + the efficiency of the rendering engine when rendering the pages under test.

Finding the power usage of the browser alone is going to be very difficult since you can't really run a browser without an OS and the various bits and pieces of hardware in the laptop which are not necessarily direclty related to running the browser.

dang• 11 years ago

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

droopyEyelids• 11 years ago

"Misleading" implies someone is trying to make you believe something that they know is not true.

"Confusing" implies something that is difficult to properly interpret, with or without the intention of the author.

leni536• 11 years ago

I wonder how using ublock and umatrix affect battery life.

noir_lord• 11 years ago

Ublock Origin I already use but I hadn't heard of umatrix, that looks like a very handy tool, thanks!

tim333• 11 years ago

I just tried an experiment turning my various blockers off - I've got uBlock, Ghostery and Flashcontrol and had 26 tabs open with random stuff in Chrome. Doing nothing user cpu was about 4 point something percent with them off vs 1 point something with them on.

jwr• 11 years ago

This confirms my unquantified observations. I use Chrome only when I have to — for ClojureScript development, because the developer tools are better.

eric_h• 11 years ago

Same here - Safari is what I use for everyday browsing, Chrome is what I use for web development. Safari's developer tools are sluggish and awkward to use, but browsing on it is just a faster, more pleasurable experience.

condescendence• 11 years ago

The title thing is funny, if you look at the URL it's a more accurate title.

Power consumption of the worlds most popular websites calculated on different browsers – Chrome vs Safari vs Firefox

http://blog.getbatterybox.com/which-browser-is-the-most-ener...

Title aside, very interesting article I'd like to see what factors play into these huge disparities of battery life loss between the different browsers.

nine_k• 11 years ago

I suppose that just displaying a page and scrolling around it consumes little energy, with a short spike during the layout phase.

What really consumes energy is compiling and executing Javascript, and playing animations (flash, gif, css, video). JS engines of all three browsers are likely different. I also suspect that Safari, being essentially single-platform, can afford platform-specific optimizations (e.g cheaper non-public API calls).

andreasley• 11 years ago

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).

mkozlows• 11 years ago

Yeah, it'd be a lot more interesting to see results for Linux and Windows, too.

The test that'd be the most interesting to me is actually Chrome on ChromeOS vs. Chrome and Firefox on Linux on the same hardware. My subjective impression from using ChromeOS is that it's much faster and more efficient than Chrome on other platforms, but I'm curious if that's really true.

TheCowboy2• 11 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised either, but the methodology for the testing doesn't seem to be fully explained, so it might lack rigor. Is it a fresh install of the OS? Are all of the caches and histories clean? What plugins are enabled?

Performance can vary based on how you configure your browser and what extensions you have enabled. I get less battery using Chrome, but it's configured in a way that I think is a superior experience, and most of the time my notebook is plugged in.

There might be unsurprising trade-offs between speed and battery life. (And if you get things done faster, does that offset the drain?) For me, usually time, not battery life, is the most scarce resource. Obviously I'd prefer to have more of both.

TD-Linux• 11 years ago

Yes, I'd also like to know the status of Flash in particular. However, they were pretty clear about the methodology of their test - their Macbook was factory-restored, they measured power using current measurement at the DC input and integrating over time, and all of the tests were automated usage. It's certainly the best power analysis that I've seen posted to HN in a while.

I'd love to see more of this in the future - a lot of tech gets thrown around on HN for its power efficiency, (GPU acceleration, media decoders, even different CSS animation types) and it would be nice to have actual numbers.

daenney• 11 years ago

A little down the article:

We used a factory-restored MacBook Pro Retina 13” to test each website on one internet browser at a time. No programs other than the browser were open.

I'm pretty sure a factory resetted Mac is a fresh install and that it won't have any caches or history. And since they don't mention plugins I'm going to make a wild assumption here and say they didn't install any after having loaded up the browsers on the machine.

stephengillie2• 11 years ago

Lots of other commenters have remarked about the lacking rigor and narrow scope of the tests. It would be interesting (and time consuming) to re-run this test with many more parameters:

  * Fresh install of OSX vs fresh install of Win8.1/Win10 on capable Macbook. (I'm unsure about Linux or other distros running on Macbooks, add that to the test if it's feasible.)
  * Javascript enabled and disabled.
  * Flash enabled and disabled. As well as Silverlight and other media players.
  * Various adblockers, tracking blockers, and content filters (like Adblock vs Adblock Plus vs uBlock vs uBlock origin, etc. And uMatrix and Ghostery et al.) This could become its own research project.
  * Logged into tracking sites (e.g. Facebook) vs logged out.

Maybe this testing could be automated with Puppet/Chef?

Edit: Windows 10 would be a definite option instead of Win8.1. I was unaware Win10 would operate on a Macbook, but in retrospect I suppose there's no reason it wouldn't.

---

Note that high-power-consuming sites also consume more electricity on desktop PCs; this is less of a concern because they are on a constantly-replenished power system. The concern may be closer to that for CFL vs incandescent lights, where we can make a few changes to the system and make it vastly more efficient, multiplied by a large userbase.

bhauer• 11 years ago

Fresh install of OSX vs fresh install of Win7 on capable Macbook

Why Windows 7 and not Windows 10? The article is capturing fascinating data, and I'd like to see how Edge stacks up.

mwcampbell• 11 years ago

Regarding Windows 10 on a MacBook via Boot Camp, I can confirm that it works; my boss has been running insider builds on his MacBook for a little while. Just make sure that if you get to Windows 10 by upgrading from a previous version, you repair the Apple driver installation afterward.

eridius• 11 years ago

Desktop PCs don't have battery concerns, certainly, but electricity still costs money, and if you can reduce the power usage of your computer by a significant amount, that can translate directly to saving money.

toyg• 11 years ago

Agree. My experience matches the test, but that's not surprising: I'm sure Office runs better on Windows, too...

MBCook3• 11 years ago

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.

melling• 11 years ago

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.

psophis2• 11 years ago

Yes, I believe this is the episode of Debug that you are thinking of: https://overcast.fm/+I_IAnJ5Y

(Couldn't find a link on imore)

ArtDev• 11 years ago

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

dgrab24• 11 years ago

Wouldn't surprise me if os x is hard coded to display its own apps more favorably. Brings to mind how apple hard coded the wireless signal bars to display better AT&T signal on the original iPhone to boost sales.

wyager• 11 years ago

It's not as if the signal bars on a phone have any standardised meaning anyway. That's just clever UX psychology.

brador• 11 years ago

What effect would turning off Javascript have on those numbers?

umeshunni• 11 years ago

Or, turning off Flash.

Eric_WVGG• 11 years ago

or ad+tracker blockers

3pt14159• 11 years ago

I also wonder what the effect of enabling https everywhere and uBlock.

jccalhoun• 11 years ago

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.

TazeTSchnitzel• 11 years ago

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.

Menge• 11 years ago

Forgive my cynicism, but I see searches for alternate metrics as probable fishing expeditions for silver linings on falling behind.

Looking at the results, and the above example of IE doing well in the past, everything seems to neatly inversely correlate with my experiences when checking caniuse.com for recent standards. (At the few sites where firefox does worse than chrome, I would wonder if the site is written for firefox then made adequate on the others == less -webkit-css and more attentions to the "best" -moz-css animations, etc.)

Since IE was the biggest failure on caniuse but is rapidly being eclipsed by safari, naturally they must pass the best power usage baton as well if they can be coaxed into otherwise equivalent environments.

A standard to handle graceful prioritization and intentional degradation for power saving could perhaps put this trick to sleep.

ColinDabritz• 11 years ago

This does matter, perhaps pretty charts would help.

Along the lines of "are we fast yet?": http://arewefastyet.com/

perhaps we could have "are we efficient yet?"

zobzu4• 11 years ago

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?

s73v3r2• 11 years ago

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.

zobzu4• 11 years ago

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?

leoedin• 11 years ago

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.

acveilleux• 11 years ago

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.

joshstrange• 11 years ago

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.

aaronbee• 11 years ago

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

diminish• 11 years ago

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

chrisgw• 11 years ago

Just make sure you have spacebar heating disabled.

computmaxer2• 11 years ago

This is well known and widely publicized by Apple. They list it as one of the major new features of Safari 7.0 and OS X Mavericks. They had similar charts in the keynote when they announced it.

computmaxer2• 11 years ago

They even list it as the second featured benefit on their website today https://www.apple.com/safari/

piyush_soni• 11 years ago

I'm wondering how much of it is related to the fact that Safari just does less? I'm sure more work needs to be done to make the browser more HTML5 compliant, for example. How much of the HTML5 parts would Safari wouldn't process at all and just ignore them?

tkyjonathan• 11 years ago

How does that help when Safari is slow and is a memory hog?

SG-2• 11 years ago

If it was "slow" it would use up more CPU time to perform a task and use more battery power.

Alphasite_2• 11 years ago

It's also been less of a memory hog than the equivilent chrome set up for me.

cptskippy2• 11 years ago

No surprises there, Apple controls both Safari and OS X. Microsoft has done the same thing with Edge on Windows 10. Does that mean I use Safari on my Mac or Edge on my Windows 10 machine? No.

closetnerd• 11 years ago

Why not use Safari? I find the UI to be leaner, frugal energy usage as well as being faster in loading many of the websites I normally browse.

The only exception is that I use Chrome when developing.

orbitur• 11 years ago

For me the killer feature would be some form of user profile, with segregated history and cookies.

I use Chrome because I can have two browser windows, one where I'm logged in to all my work tools and my work Gmail account, and another window where I look at Twitter and HN and I can have my personal Gmail account open.

I'll happily switch to Safari if they give me that. Chrome's general CPU usage aside, it performs especially terrible when using Google's very own products: video Hangouts (for work) and YouTube.

Google Hangouts in Chrome will set my Retina MBP on fire, but if I log in and join the Hangout in Safari, all is well again.

gyc• 11 years ago

I experience so many more random beach balls using Safari that I never experience using Chrome. That is why I use Chrome.

s73v3r2• 11 years ago

All of the optimizations done to Safari are available for Chrome as well. They simply haven't done it.

cptskippy2• 11 years ago

Yes, but when Mavericks launched the emphasis on power optimization features was new. There are also many performance compromises in Safari because of all the throttling.

st3fan• 11 years ago

It will be interesting to see how these numbers change with OS X 10.11 with Safari's new Content Blockers enabled. That will result in less network connections and less JavaScript.

1ris• 11 years ago

I just found out that my laptop has a signicant longer battery life if I use dwb instead of firefox (vimperator). It's a bit crude, but i start to like it.

kitsunesoba• 11 years ago

I think it's important to highlight that these benefits aren't exclusive to Safari; they encompass all of WebKit on OS X. Unlike Google who has inexorably tied Blink to Chrome, Apple pours most of its efforts into WebKit itself. As such, any developer using WebKit, especially on OS X, gets these benefits.

A great example is how each browser handles per-tab processes: with Chrome, this architecture is part of Chrome itself. In contrast, Safari's implementation is baked in at the framework level with WebKit.

The WebKit dev team really pushes for power efficiency in a much bigger way than the Chrome dev team does. Things like heavy JS and content blocking lists getting compiled down into bytecode via LLVM are both products of the WebKit dev team's focus on the race to idle.

I think it's also worth noting that there is a large difference in the two companies' vision for the web: Apple sees the browser as a vehicle for viewing websites. Google sees it as something more akin to an operating system. As such, it's only natural that their end goals are different.

mattangriffel• 11 years ago

Does that mean these findings should hold true for iOS as well?

brazzledazzle2• 11 years ago

Every browser on iOS uses Webkit.

bumblebritches5• 11 years ago

Yes. Safari is much more efficient on iOS

xd1936• 11 years ago

Not particularly. iOS browsers all use WebKit, regardless of which app it is. iOS doesn't allow third-party rendering engines, so every browser gets these supposed WebKit battery benefits.

icefox• 11 years ago

Once you learn that Safari gives you a longer battery life and you are using a tablet or laptop for every day browsing activity it makes it hard to choose anything other than Safari for this reason alone. Choosing Safari means I can waste more time reading hacker news. Who doesn't want that?

SG-2• 11 years ago

I believe it's actually worse on a 15" MacBook Pro which has a dedicated GPU along with the Intel GPU. Chrome seems to force using the dedicated GPU over the onboard even at app launch which I assume drains even more power.

x00544• 11 years ago

https://gfx.io/ will let you lock it in onboard gpu mode. I only use the discrete card for games and video editing.

bronz• 11 years ago

I switched to Safari on my Macbook a long time ago because I noticed it was a lot warmer whenever I used Chrome to watch Youtube. It's kinda cool to see these graphs confirm my crude assumption.

timc3• 11 years ago

this is actually caused me to switch to Safari from Chrome some time ago - I noticed a lot better battery, but also the fan kick in less on my MacBook Pro.

phkn1• 11 years ago

Safari on Yosemite also shows power usage per tab which is great for identifying rogue websites.

Also... TIL that some sites take more power to render than a 1080p stream!

This also of reinforces the argument for installing an ad blocker -- less elements to process on each page means less power used. µBlock is particularly promising as it's very lightweight.

Lerc• 11 years ago

some sites take more power to render than a 1080p stream!

This is an interesting aspect of Optimisation. If video decoding were developed using similar standards to the bulk of software it would only be capable of displaying a slideshow.

Video gets massively optimised (at all levels) because the alternative is 'No Video'. It is a good demonstration of the gap between the performance of software and what it could be. Most software can get by being a little bit sluggish so we grumble and suffer but it is not a deal-breaker. What we buy with that performance hit is easier development.

robbrown451• 11 years ago

I'm thinking of switching to Safari for most browsing, not so much because of battery, since I'm usually plugged in, but because Chrome is painfully slow to scroll on complex sites, especially on the Retina display -- while Safari is as smooth as butter. I would guess these issues are related, since Chrome is presumably doing a lot of unnecessary things (reflows?) with the CPU that could better be handled by the graphics system.

x00544• 11 years ago

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 of the more recent changes to Safari optional.

ljoshua• 11 years ago

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.

pax• 11 years ago

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 :/

DavideNL2• 11 years ago

For me it's the other way round, i've been trying to use Firefox but the "pinch to zoom" feature in Safari is so smooth, and so crappy in Firefox, that i always keep coming back to Safari... If you read a lot of text on a Macbook, being able to zoom quickly and efficiently becomes a high priority.

Things like this are much more important for me than energy-efficiency.

joshuapants2• 11 years ago

If you read a lot of text on a Macbook, being able to zoom quickly and efficiently becomes a high priority

I read lots of text on my Macbook and I have never purposely used this feature. On occasion I have accidentally engaged it, which is annoying.

brazzledazzle2• 11 years ago

You may want to get a checkup from an optometrist. No joke. I think almost everyone is affected by age-related degeneration of their vision at some point or another.

x00544• 11 years ago

I use the text reader built into the OS, due to my Dyslexia, so I guess I never noticed :) For me it's just highlight and press the key to have the test read to me, I have "Samantha" cranked all the way to the top speed. That said, Chrome also has very nice pinch to zoom nowadays.

waxjar• 11 years ago

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.

msbarnett• 11 years ago

Give the OmniKey extension a look, for prefix searches

sobri• 11 years ago

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

sim0n• 11 years ago

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

tuananh• 11 years ago

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

X-Istence• 11 years ago

YouTube sends VP8 or VP9 videos to Chrome, whereas on Safari it uses h264, which can be decoded in hardware. That alone will have a huge difference in power associated with it.

Steko2• 11 years ago

Would be interesting to see the YT tests redone with add ons that force h264 for Firefox and Chrome.

donovanr• 11 years ago

These results seem unconvincing without any error bars / confidence intervals, or even a mention of the number of replicates performed (though the downloadable data set seems to indicate that each test condition was performed only once?)

anonyfox• 11 years ago

I use chrome as a on-demand flash player when needed, and hands down, the DevTools are excellent.

But other than that... I switched to safari a few months ago and after a little "learning curve" I love it. Scrolling is butter smooth, performance is perceived really good, the UI is minimal (I don't use bookmarks anymore), and handoff or pinching for a tab overview is great for me. uBlock and Ghostery are really mandatory today for a convenient browsing experience and are available for safari, too.

What's really missing: favicons in tabs, pinned tabs and a dark mode for the window chrome, that matches the dark menu bar in yosemite. AFAIK, favicons+pinned tabs are coming with el capitan.

Just my 0.02$

rebootthesystem• 11 years ago

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.

lectrick• 11 years ago

TBH if you use Chrome, More Tools > Task Manager will show you the hogs, and you can kill whatever makes sense

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

Related Stories