A project evaluated the battery performance of a MacBook when using different browsers and Apple’s stood out!
Safari is the default browser for devices with the bitten apple logo. Security is one of the features most highlighted by the company when recommending it over the competition, of course, it is not the only one. Safari on macOS consumes three times less battery than other browsersaccording to a test which leaves no doubt.
Software engineer MrManafon shared in a post on Medium in which he sought to answer why browser energy efficiency matters, especially since most of the applications we use to work depend on browsers. To do this, he compared behavior of Safari, Chrome, Arc, Edge, Firefox, Orion, Brave and Opera.
Safari’s battery performance is incredible
Although some users care more about performance, this one decided Focus on battery performance when using different browsers, on your MacBook Pro 14″ M1 Pro with 32GB M1 RAM and macOS Ventura 13.3.1. To do this, I tried to “do the very balanced test” of 20 minutes which simulated my own real use, with second precision, three times per browser to guarantee the stability of the data:
In previous tests, which included significantly more tab switching and no WebGL or media consumption, Safari used 10 times less than Chrome.
Energy performance of various browsers on MacBook M1.
After these tests, the author shared the conclusions comparing the battery performance of Safari and other browsers:
*Safari: it’s 3x more efficient (up to 5x in some tests), flicker-free, privacy-focused, and stable, but in the long run it mimics 60fps animation and is buggy when it comes to WebGL. While The Mac M1 fan never overheats. The difference was much larger in previous tests that used more complex web applications and involved lots of tab switching.
- Chromium: is the king when it comes to performance. We feel more agile and faster. And they seem to reserve all available resources in the world, run at maximum fps and preload the entire internet. However, it consumes three times more battery than Safari.
- Bow: the result was almost on par with Firefox and well below other Blink/Chromium browsers. There are no power consumption spikes when using the user interface.
- Orion: In terms of energy, really worked very well, almost on par with Safari.
- Firefox: was closer to Safari than Chrome when it comes to energy efficiency.
In 2023, Safari was the second most used web browser in the world and although the advantage with Google Chrome is wide, the preference has increased, thanks to the specific needs in which Apple’s browser is considered invincible.
