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0 pointsdijit4mo ago0 comments

> Safari.... I dont know why this battery life argument keeps coming up because it is not the case. It hasn't been so for at least 5 - 6 years.

I mean, observably, this is still the case.

Now, luckily the M-series laptops have such insane battery life that it barely matters compared to before... but I can still observe about an hour of battery life difference between Safari and Chrome on an M2 Macbook Air (running Sequoia). Now, my battery life is still in the region of 7.5 hours, so even if it's a large difference it's not impacting my workday yet (though the battery is at 90% max design capacity from wear).

I know this, because there are days where I only use chrome, and days where I only use Safari, and I do roughly the same work on each of those days.

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wilkystyle4mo ago

I suspect that the people making these claims that Safari is no longer the most battery efficient are not Apple users. It's quite easy to empirically validate which browsers are most efficient by looking at the average energy impact in Activity Monitor. Safari is the winner, Chrome/Brave are not far behind, and Firefox is the clear loser.

ksec4mo ago

I use all three.

Safari loses out when you run with a lot of Tabs. Both Chrome and Firefox knows when to unload tabs. ( Firefox even have about:unloads to tell you the order of Tabs it will unload! )

Try opening Tab Overview in Safari and it will start loading all the website for thumbnails, paging out to disk due to low memory, writing hundreds of GB to page. It also put Tabs on low running priority in the background rather than pausing them like Firefox or Chrome. ( Not sure if that is still the case with Safari 26, at least it was with 18 ). To combat that, restarting the browser time to time helps.

Safari is well tuned for iOS as a single tab, single page usage. On MacOS when doing many tabs it start to get slow and inefficient. And this is very much a Safari issue not an Webkit issue because Orion is a lot better at it.

And yes I have filed Radar report for many of the issues but I have come to the conclusion Apple doesn't care about multi tab usage on desktop Safari.

phantasmish4mo ago

I think the difference is fundamental to the engine and the gap will be hard to close, too (I mean, how long has it been and the gap remains?). WebKit-based ultralight browsers remain usable after you’ve cranked hardware specs down far enough that nothing based on Chrome or Firefox’s engines do. Resource use among the three engines seems to differ at some kind of low, basic architecture level.

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