This week is the WebKit Contributor’s meeting — with the browser engineers who contribute to WebKit. Including from Apple, Igalia, Sony, Redhat & more.

Did you know that WebKit is not just the browser engine for Safari — but for many other browsers, apps, and platforms as well? Igalia @igalia maintains two of them: WebKitGTK @WebKitGTK and WPE @WPEWebKit

WebKit is especially great for devices that don’t have a lot of power. It’s used for digital signs, medical devices, game consoles and more!

@jensimmons @igalia @WebKitGTK @WPEWebKit I just switched back from Firefox to Safari (after FF leaning into advertising and AI), and the battery life of my M1 is easily 2x or more of what it was with FF, even with an extension that snoozed inactive tabs. Crazy. Thanks for your work on power efficiency, keep it up!!! 🙏
@jni @jensimmons @igalia @WebKitGTK @WPEWebKit yeah, I use Safari almost exclusively and benefit from the power savings, too. Colleagues can never understand why I use it, until they try it
@rachel @jni @jensimmons @igalia @WebKitGTK @WPEWebKit I tried to switch a few times from FF, but every time I go back as soon as I see how many ads are there on the internet. It’s a pity that Safari is not supporting normal ad blockers
@asci @jni @jensimmons @igalia @WebKitGTK @WPEWebKit what’s a “normal” ad blocker? I use 1Blocker and it’s great
@rachel @jni @jensimmons @igalia @WebKitGTK @WPEWebKit uBlock? Like the ones that can modify pages content, iirc Safari not allowing that
@asci @rachel @jensimmons @igalia @WebKitGTK @WPEWebKit I agree with Rachel — Safari ad-blockers do the job. I also use 1Blocker and it fully fixed the initial shock.(it’s insane that many people experience the web like this.)
@jni @jensimmons @igalia @WebKitGTK @WPEWebKit I would probably switch from FF to Safari too, if more than like 10% of my extensions worked on Safari 🫠
@avakining yeah the extension issue is a bummer, but I guess I am a simple man with simple needs. 😜 (refined-github is available and that plus an ad-blocker were basically enough 😂). What’s your MVP extension that you would miss?

@jni Just the ones I use every single day:

- uBlock Origin
- XKit Rewritten
- Indie Wiki Buddy
- Shinigami Eyes
- PronounDB

And that’s not even mentioning the ones I only use a few times per week :/

@jni @jensimmons @igalia @WebKitGTK @WPEWebKit I love Safari, despite REALLY wanting there to be competition for it (no offense Jen 😀) but it is flat out the most privacy aware and effective web browser out there (IMO)

@jni @jensimmons @igalia @WebKitGTK @WPEWebKit

Not to start a thing but Safari also has AI features

@jni @jensimmons @igalia @WebKitGTK @WPEWebKit that's nothing new. #Apple does optimize #Safari to hell to get their crazy-ass battery runtimes...
Matt Birchler (@[email protected])

I’ve spent 36 hours over the last 3 days to see how much more battery Chrome uses than Safari on the Mac. Is it true? Is an outdated fact? More people should do more testing, but my findings are not what I expected. https://birchtree.me/blog/everyone-says-chrome-devastates-mac-battery-life-but-does-it-i-tested-for-36-hours-to-find-out/

Feeling Social
@manu @kkarhan @jni @jensimmons @igalia @WebKitGTK @WPEWebKit Didn’t test Firefox, but yeah, I’d say there’s a lot of placebo effect out there 😅

@matt @manu @jni @jensimmons @igalia @WebKitGTK @WPEWebKit AFAIK, Apple's Safari - unlike Firefox - avoids using dedicaded hardware accelerators unless that's deemed more energy-efficient for the platform it runs on.

  • Since it's basically macOS & iOS-exclusive, they pull a shitload of optimizations into it - kinda like FinalCutPro.

#Apple #iOS #macOS #Safari #SafariBrowser #Optimization #BatteryRuntime #Battery

@matt @manu @kkarhan @jensimmons @igalia @WebKitGTK @WPEWebKit

I’d be interested to see FF results! Indeed FF could probably also catch up if they had their priorities straight. 🙃

Definitely no placebo here though — I wasn’t looking for it, I’d just gotten used to checking my battery levels often.

Lots of factors too — I typically have 100+ tabs 😅 and rarely watch video — so eg YT WebM on Chrome vs mp4 on Safari would make no difference for me.

@jni @matt @manu @jensimmons @igalia @WebKitGTK @WPEWebKit yeah, @mozilla need to get thdir shit together or yeet Firefox to @torproject and make Tor Browser the Upstream...

#Firefox #Browsers #Tor #TorBrowser #Browser

@jni @jensimmons @igalia @WebKitGTK @WPEWebKit

Hmmm. I am happy to know about your results in contrast to FF. Apparently Google Chrome also did a huge progress on energy consumption. Not so much of a battery killer anymore and in some benchmarks Chrome performed even better than Safari.

https://birchtree.me/blog/everyone-says-chrome-devastates-mac-battery-life-but-does-it-i-tested-for-36-hours-to-find-out/

PS. I am not here to defend Chrome. Safari is also my daily driver. I just wish that Apple fixed bookmarks sync one day 🙏

https://pawelgrzybek.com/apple-please-fix-the-safari-reading-list/

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

@pawelgrzybek @jensimmons @igalia @WebKitGTK @WPEWebKit indeed and to be perfectly clear — fuck Chrome. 😂

Sorry to hear about your reading list experience. I was a long-time user of Pocket before Apple added Reading List so this does not affect me. Fully on board with the defaults issue. (Currently considering a move to @wallabag but the inertia is very powerful 😂)