* 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.
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.
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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.
Why Windows 7 and not Windows 10? The article is capturing fascinating data, and I'd like to see how Edge stacks up.
(Couldn't find a link on imore)
The test that'd be the most interesting to me is actually Chrome on ChromeOS vs. Chrome and Firefox on Linux on the same hardware. My subjective impression from using ChromeOS is that it's much faster and more efficient than Chrome on other platforms, but I'm curious if that's really true.
Performance can vary based on how you configure your browser and what extensions you have enabled. I get less battery using Chrome, but it's configured in a way that I think is a superior experience, and most of the time my notebook is plugged in.
There might be unsurprising trade-offs between speed and battery life. (And if you get things done faster, does that offset the drain?) For me, usually time, not battery life, is the most scarce resource. Obviously I'd prefer to have more of both.
I'd love to see more of this in the future - a lot of tech gets thrown around on HN for its power efficiency, (GPU acceleration, media decoders, even different CSS animation types) and it would be nice to have actual numbers.
> We used a factory-restored MacBook Pro Retina 13” to test each website on one internet browser at a time. No programs other than the browser were open.
I'm pretty sure a factory resetted Mac is a fresh install and that it won't have any caches or history. And since they don't mention plugins I'm going to make a wild assumption here and say they didn't install any after having loaded up the browsers on the machine.
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.
Things like this are much more important for me than energy-efficiency.
I read lots of text on my Macbook and I have never purposely used this feature. On occasion I have accidentally engaged it, which is annoying.
The only thing I really miss in Safari is searching websites using a prefix.
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.
The only exception is that I use Chrome when developing.
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.
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.
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.
So you look a site like Mashable and with Safari you're getting 1/3 the battery life of Cult of Mac. That's crazy.
But then on a few sites things are really nuts. What is going on with Forbes where Chrome's battery life is 50% what Firefox and Safari get? Something is going on there.
This was neat to see.
"Confusing" implies something that is difficult to properly interpret, with or without the intention of the author.
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.
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.
testing a dell, a lenevo, and the ms surface sounds more like the target for windows doesnt it?
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.
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.
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...
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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.
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).
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.
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$
Along the lines of "are we fast yet?": http://arewefastyet.com/
perhaps we could have "are we efficient yet?"
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.