Last year I compared the battery life using Safari and Chrome on a Mac. The critical thing that was different from this test to all the others I've seen out there is that this is actually a long term test and it was replicating the same workflow across all browsers AND it was always starting at 100% battery life, which is relevant since Apple holds the 100% reported battery life for a while longer than any other percentage.

Read that post if you want to see the full details, but the gist was that with 36 hours of testing data under my belt, I found Safari burned through battery about 7% faster than Chrome. Not exactly what you would have expected, but it was replicable over many tests.

Today's update

Today's updated bit of data is less scientific than the last time, but I ran the same tests one a few browsers again over the past few days, keeping every variable the same except for the browser in use: this time testing Zen, Arc, and Safari. This is the macOS Tahoe beta, so not a scientific test bench by any means, but the results after a 5 hour test run repeated twice for each browser was very consistent. In summary, after 5 hours of web browsing (M4 Pro MacBook Pro),

  • Safari brought the battery life down to 61%
  • Arc brought it down to 67%
  • Zen brought it down to 68%

This is actually a bigger gap than we saw previously, although of course now we're using a beta operating system and two beta browsers. The story is the same in my eyes though, use whatever web browser you like because I'm yet to find a browser so much worse on your battery than anything else (and Safari is consistently and inexplicably the hardest).

This is also the point where I say that this test is available on GitHub, so you can run it yourself or tweak it to your liking if you want.