Chrome, Safari, and battery myths
On this week's Waveform podcast, Marques Brownlee and crew were talking about browsers and a common topic came up:
Safari is only good for one thing, which is battery life.
And:
Commonly accepted facts.
Accepted by who? Lunatics?
I would say ask any browser enthusiast.
And:
I'm on an Apple Silicon laptop. Battery life is going to be legit no matter what or where I'm going.
No, no, it's not. That's not true.
Bro, I'm a super turbo power user. I can at least get like four hours of battery life minimum.
The difference between Chrome and Safari in regular browsing for several hours is shockingly high. It's huge.
Really?
It's dramatic. This laptop is terrifyingly long-lasting battery on Safari, is average at best with Chrome.
I happened to test exactly this in 2024, and I took great care to document my process and findings. Here's what I found:
In my 3-hour tests, Safari consumed 18.67% of my battery each time on average, and Chrome averaged 17.33% battery drain. That works out to about 9% less battery drain from Chrome than Safari. Yes, you read that right, I found Chrome was easier on my battery than Safari.
Yeah, I found that in controlled tests where I did the exact same things in both browsers for hours at a time (across multiple test runs), and found that they were very close to each other, with Chrome using slightly less battery. As Marques put it, it sounds like Chrome halves his Mac's battery life. As someone who uses Chrome for work and spends all day in it doing work in Atlassian apps and video calls, I can confidently say it easily makes it through an 8-9 hour work day on battery. This is true of my M5 Pro and it was also true of my M1.
I asked for any sort of data from the past decade people had to back up the idea that Chrome was horrible on battery and Safari was a saint, and I got nothing sent my way in 2024. If you have it now, I'd love to see it! Hit me up on Mastodon if you've got it!
Until I get any sort of compelling data, I'm going to continue thinking that people who think this are just like people who think that religiously force closing your iPhone apps improves your phone's speed and battery. It's a shared hallucination that feels like it's true, even though it's not. Considering many Safari users can't seem to believe that Chrome is a faster browser than Safari these days either, despite effectively every benchmark showing this, I suspect the feelings will continue.