It’s one of the most pervasive common wisdoms shared all over the web, no matter where you go – it’s one of those things everybody seems to universally agree on: Chrome will absolutely devastate your battery life on the Mac, and you should really be using Safari, because Apple’s special integration magic pixie dust sprinkles ensures Safari sips instead of gulps electricity. Whether you read random forum posters, Apple PR spokespeople, or Apple’s own executives on stage during events, this wisdom is hard to escape.
Is it true, though?
Well, Matt Birchler decided to do something entirely revolutionary and entirely unheard of: a benchmark. Back in the olden days of yore, we would run benchmarks to test the claims from companies and their PR departments, and Birchler decided to dust off this old technique and develop a routine to put the Chrome battery claims to the test. After 3 days of continuous testing on a freshly installed 14” MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro processor and 16 GB RAM running the latest stable releases of both browsers, Birchler came to some interesting conclusions.
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.
While I did experience some variability in each 3 hour test run, Chrome came out on top in 5 of the 6 direct comparisons.
↫ Matt Birchler
His methodology seems quite sound and a good representation of what most laptop users will use their browser for: YouTube, social media, a few news websites, and editing a Google Doc, in a 20 minute loop that was repeated for three hours per test. Multiple of these three hour tests were then ran to counter variability. I highly doubt using different websites will radically change the results, but I obviously am curious to see a similar test ran on Windows and Linux, x86 and ARM, for a more complete picture that goes beyond just the Mac.
Conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong, and I think we have a classic case of that here. While there may have been a time in the past where Chrome on the Mac devastated battery life, it seems Chrome and Chromium engineers have closed the gap, and in some cases even beat Safari. Now, this doesn’t mean everybody should rush and switch to Chrome, since there are countless other reasons to use Safari over Chrome other than supposed battery life advantages.
With Apple PR arguing that alternative browser engines should not be allowed on iOS because Chrome would devastate iOS’ battery life, tests like these are more important than ever, and I hope we’re going to see more of them. Tech media always just seems to copy/paste whatever manufacturers and corporations claim without so much as a hint of skepticism, and this benchmark highlights the dangers of doing so, in case you didn’t already know believing corporations was a terribly idea.
Thom Holwerda,
At times I’ve encountered flak for insisting on independent benchmarks, but too often marketing departments manipulate/cherry pick/obfuscate the truth. They are hired to promote products, not to be impartial. It should be obvious to all of us that we always need to push for independent data. Marketing claims to be corroborated! Corporations like apple really try to control the messaging and even make sure their comparative claims are not independently verifiable. They like to do this a lot: “23% faster than a leading competitor” (what manufacturer and model?) and using graphs with unlabeled axis that don’t start at 0, which makes a tiny improvements look arbitrarily large. They give preferential access to favorable product reviewers so that up until launch they get tons of press echoing their marketing claims yet almost no independent information is available. When independent reviewers do finally get to independently review the product, it’s already at the tail end of the news cycle.
Your hatred for Apple is so nonsensical you should stop covering other OSes than Linux.
I’m not seeing any negativity on Thom’s part anywhere in this article, and certainly no attacks on Apple. In fact, the most negative thing he wrote was “Is it true, though?”, which is a valid question.
Here he was asking for a comparison to Chrome on Windows and Linux on both major architectures for those OSes, which is something I’d be interested in seeing too. It’s definitely not a dig against Apple, it’s a request for a broader picture.
While this section actually praises Safari for (I assume) its superiority in user privacy. That’s exactly the opposite sentiment you are accusing Thom of.
This is what I feel the article is actually about, honesty in journalism. I can imagine a similar article about Nvidia and AMD GPU benchmarks, or Intel and AMD CPU benchmarks, and the conclusion is the same: Journalists have a duty to be fair and unbiased when reviewing hardware and software, yet this is extremely difficult for them to do because of corporate pressure to never show them in a negative light or risk losing access to future versions of whatever is being reviewed or benchmarked.
How any of that has anything to do with how Thom personally feels about Apple is beyond my comprehension.
This story actually also applies to linux and *BSD. The engine for Safari, webkit, is open source and the basis for a few different browsers such as Gnome Web (epiphany), Midori (old verisons as there was a shift to electron and then gecko), and a few smaller ones.
Google actually announced a specific effort to address battery life on MacOS with Chrome version 110 last March, with a number of Mac-specific fixes. It was covered in the tech press, such as by ghacks on March 2, 2023. Not that I am giving Google any credit here – I only view them as the world’s largest advertising company which occasionally works on technology issues in order to lock more users into their advertising universe.
I’m pretty sure Thom is an equal opportunity critic of all marketing BS, no matter the source. GNU/Linux distros certainly get their fair helping of humble pie on this blog, just like Windows, MacOS, etc. Anything less would go against the ethics of journalism.
Eh, benchmarks very much depend on the particular workloads. Just like AMD & intel often cherry pick benchmarks that show their strengths its also possible with browser battery usage. I do find it somewhat suspicious here that youtube was chosen. I mean thats a very normal and common thing to do with a web browser, but its a platform under google’s control as is Chrome. I would be surprised if safari was more performant here. But what’s the alternative? Maybe viewing a video on peertube to go along with the mastodon choice? mastedon, while not a micro site, isn’t very normal they have something like 1 million monthly active users, I think. Would have gone reddit myself.
Also he’s trying really hard to be scientific, which I applaud, but when ever I see a benchmark without uncertainty, my red pen fingers twitch. With our doing the proper statistics on his data, I’d guess its a wash between the browsers. Which is to say Chrome’s probably just as good as Safari for battery use, except for some workloads.
Would’ve been cool to include Firefox as well. I don’t think it would have won, but maybe it would’ve been close, maybe not.