
Safari is more energy-efficient than Chrome and Firefox on OS X - timsher
http://blog.getbatterybox.com/which-browser-is-the-most-energy-efficient-chrome-vs-safari-vs-firefox/
======
kitsunesoba
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
Does that mean these findings should hold true for iOS as well?

~~~
xd1936
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.

------
andreasley
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).

~~~
stephengillie
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.

~~~
eridius
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.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
The cost of electricity for running a desktop computer is on the order of 2
cents per hour (assuming it draws around 200 W while browsing). If you reduce
that by 20%, you save a whopping $8 a year if you spend 5 hours browsing every
day.

No, this is mainly motivated by laptops, and I'd say it's even more related to
thermal management than battery life. Macbooks are notorious for being very
hot under high load, so naturally Apple wants a common task like browsing to
be low load/heat.

------
aaronbee
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](https://plus.google.com/+PeterKasting/posts/GpL63A1K2TF)

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

~~~
chrisgw
Just make sure you have spacebar heating disabled.

------
jccalhoun
Microsoft paid for a similar study a couple years ago.
[http://blogs.windows.com/ie/2013/06/05/internet-
explorer-10-...](http://blogs.windows.com/ie/2013/06/05/internet-
explorer-10-is-the-most-energy-efficient-browser-on-windows-8/)

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
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
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.

------
x0054
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.

~~~
DavideNL
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.

~~~
brazzledazzle
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.

~~~
DavideNL
Well coincidentally i've been to an optometrist in a hospital about a year
ago, my eyes are perfect (i don't have glasses.)

If i open
[https://news.ycombinator.com/news](https://news.ycombinator.com/news) on my
Macbook pro retina 15" i see news items 1 to 22 in a tiny font.. so i zoom to
about 10 items which i find much easier to read (bigger text and less info),
and using pinch to zoom you can do it very easily - in Safari.

------
FroshKiller
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.

~~~
jacquesm
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.

------
phkn1
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
> 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.

------
X-Istence
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.

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

------
robbrown451
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.

------
leoedin
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.

------
computmaxer
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.

~~~
computmaxer
They even list it as the second featured benefit on their website today
[https://www.apple.com/safari/](https://www.apple.com/safari/)

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

~~~
eric_h
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.

------
SG-
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.

~~~
x0054
[https://gfx.io/](https://gfx.io/) will let you lock it in onboard gpu mode. I
only use the discrete card for games and video editing.

------
condescendence
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

vs

[http://blog.getbatterybox.com/which-browser-is-the-most-
ener...](http://blog.getbatterybox.com/which-browser-is-the-most-energy-
efficient-chrome-vs-safari-vs-firefox/)

__

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
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).

------
st3fan
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.

------
leni536
I wonder how using ublock and umatrix affect battery life.

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

~~~
tim333
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.

------
acveilleux
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.

------
anonyfox
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$

------
ColinDabritz
This does matter, perhaps pretty charts would help.

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

perhaps we could have "are we efficient yet?"

------
bronz
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.

------
rebootthesystem
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.

------
joshstrange
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.

------
donovanr
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?)

------
3pt14159
I also wonder what the effect of enabling https everywhere and uBlock.

------
brador
What effect would turning off Javascript have on those numbers?

~~~
umeshunni
Or, turning off Flash.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
or ad+tracker blockers

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

------
piyush_soni
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?

------
timc3
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.

------
zobzu
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?

~~~
s73v3r
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.

~~~
zobzu
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?

------
1ris
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.

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

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

------
cptskippy
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
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
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.

