Matt Birchler
Everyone says Chrome devastates Mac battery life, but does it? I tested for 36 hours to find out. https://birchtree.me/blog/everyone-says-chrome-devastates-mac-battery-life-but-does-it-i-tested-for-36-hours-to-find-out/
Everyone says Chrome devastates Mac battery life, but does it? I tested for 36 hours to find out.

Long time Birchtree readers know I love data, and love data even more when I can throw it into a graph. I’m also a fan of testing things that everyone generally agrees are true, but no one seems to have any data to back up. That brings us to

Birchtree
Sep 15, 2024 at 7:25amWeb
Show threadWill RichardsonSep 15, 2024
@matt nice job getting this together! I hope someone compares with Firefox and maybe some other popular chromium-based browsers too
Show threadMatt BirchlerSep 15, 2024
@willhbr Thank you! And yeah, totally agreed. Out of curiosity, I tested on Arc twice since posting this and it’s within the margin of variance I was getting with Chrome as well.
Show threadJonathan L.Sep 15, 2024
@matt might be a good second test to see what Chrome is doing when it doesn't have all the resources. Chrome is said to consume all the RAM it can get, maybe it's either battery life or RAM but you can't have efficiency in both?
Show threadMatt BirchlerSep 15, 2024
@namekkural So it wasn’t part of the test, but Chrome was also using less RAM at the end of each run that I checked it.
Show threadJonathan L.Sep 15, 2024
@matt interesting!
Show threadMikael ForsgrenSep 15, 2024
@matt Thank you for your service! 🙏 Would be interesting to see how much browser extensions affect battery life. I’d imagine it depends a lot but content blockers probably end up helping.
Show threadMatt BirchlerSep 15, 2024
@mf Yeah this was a variable I’d want to test if I devoted more weeks to it. I was mostly trying to see if chrome was fundamentally terrible as some think it is, but yeah tons more variants that could be done!
Show threadMae, gaeSep 15, 2024
@matt Okay, so you asked for feedback on how you did it wrong, all wrong, so here's some (sorry if that was sarcasm) First off, you're doing battery percentage tests, and as you have seen, those do not correspond neatly to actual charge on the battery (the os fudges them). You could have used the more detailed stats, although idk if mac os has those neatly accessible. But the real problem isn't that; 1/2
Show threadMae, gaeSep 15, 2024

@matt The real problem in my opinion is that you should have used error analysis. That would have compensated for use of battery percentage (most of the time). Just calculating the standard error of your experiment would have a way more significant result. (you can still do that, if you want) A simple t-test would have helped your argument a lot.

But I do really like the idea of actually testing this instead of following people's guts. Thanks for that! 2/2

Show threadYury MolodtsovSep 15, 2024
@deciMae @matt Yep, considering the effort involved in this test anyway calculating errors would be just perfect
Show threadYury MolodtsovSep 15, 2024
@deciMae @matt I've also seen this interesting test
https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/12n7162/part_3_final_browser_energy_efficiency_benchmarks/
Show threadMatt BirchlerSep 15, 2024
@deciMae Interesting, I didn’t know of this concept before now, so thank you. I did note the variability and tried to extensively explain how I attempted to reduce that variability skewing the overall results, but as a real amateur over here, I get that might not stand up to strict scrutiny.
Show threadJohnny HuynhSep 15, 2024
@matt Great to see some concrete data on this. Thanks for sharing!
Show threadAndreas KarstenSep 17, 2024
@matt Hey Matt, a question out of curiosity: Why are these kind of efficiency tests (yours, the reddit one linked to in a reply) done with such a small number of tabs – 36 at the end of one 3-hour test in your case? Most people I know have hundreds of tabs open, in several browser windows, and that’s where Chrome and most Chromium based browsers on MacOS continue to suck big time, both in efficient ram and battery usage…
Show threadDon MartiSep 17, 2024

@matt one really interesting difference between Chrome and Safari is that Chrome now has a built-in ad auction which runs in a separate process (PAAPI). Adtech data says it's slow so it might also have an impact on battery life https://www.adexchanger.com/the-sell-sider/privacy-sandboxs-latency-issues-will-cost-publishers/

Google doesn't run PAAPI for the ads on their own sites, and Mastodon doesn't have ads at all, so this feature probably has less impact on your test than on a test of visiting many sites including both retailers and advertisers

Privacy Sandbox’s Latency Issues Will Cost Publishers

The Privacy Sandbox’s Protected Audiences API causes increased latency, decreasing viewability and yield.

AdExchanger
Show threadMark BestavrosSep 17, 2024

@matt This is an awesome test, and an awesome writeup! 👏

I wrote a similar power consumption benchmark tool for Android web browsers recently - if you're interested, I posted about it here: https://fosstodon.org/@mbestavros/112604246071206076

The small spoiler is that there ARE meaningful power consumption differences, especially on different types of devices! It was really fun finding that out.

Mark Bestavros (@[email protected])

I've got something cool to share! Sometime last year, I found myself wondering: "how much battery do #Firefox and #Chrome consume on #android?" I couldn't find a good answer. So I wrote a tool to test them myself! And the results are fascinating. https://github.com/mbestavros/browser-power-hour

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