Chrome also destroys battery life. Just waiting for certain MacRumors posters to say their iPhone battery life tanking after they take advantage of the EU forcing alternate browser engines on iOS is Apple “complying maliciously” with the DMA vs. getting exactly what they asked for.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Launches New Safari Ad Campaign: 'A Browser That's Actually Private'
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
I don't use Chrome by name but do use Brave and Firefox and oh boy my experience is nearly the exact opposite.
Both Brave and Firefox I can have 20+ tabs open on my M2 Pro MBP w/16GB of RAM and it's barely breaking a sweat. Get any more than 10 tabs in Safari on the same machine and it's begging for mercy. Same set of extensions on both.
When I try to use Safari all day I have to quit all of Safari about every 3 hours to clean up the phantom profile windows it has left open and to clear the RAM it's leaked all over.
wow, this is crazy. I've done side by side tests and monitored CPU usage, memory, etc... and Safari has always used the least amount of system resources. Firefox is not far off, but Chrome easily used 2x or more. The fan rarely ramps with with Safari or Firefox, but it always goes haywire with Chrome.
I don’t know how browsers, WebKit, or software in general work with macOS, much less iO/iPadOS so this may have nothing to do with your experience and the previous poster who have such different impressions of CPU usage and performance of Safari and Firefox. My question is: Is some of Safari’s CPU usage hidden in processes that are not reported as Safari, but as “system tasks”?
The previous poster also mentioned a big difference in performance when Safari has many tabs open. I rarely have more than 4 or 5 open, and have not experienced what he/she does. I often have more tabs open on DDG, and haven’t experienced much degradation in performance.
I use the DDG browser for a lot of searching on my iPad/iPHone to reduce ads, but rely on Safari’s bookmarking capability for links that I may want to access repeatedly. I haven’t monitored DDG performance on my MacBook, but it seems really fast compared to Safari on my iPad/iPhone. I guess this is partly due to the fact I don’t have a Safari ad blocker installed.
I’m interested in performance of browsers since my MacBook Pro is stuck on Monterey and is showing its age!
I compare overall CPU/GPU/memory usage so that catches all differences however they may be categorized. And I routinely have 50+ tabs open lol. Safari always stays at baseline levels regardless of tab size. It just runs leaner for me.
I wonder if it’s all the extensions people run which are causing this difference. I have a few adblock extensions but that’s it.
I only know enough about it to keep myself in trouble so I'll try to refrain from speculation on the technicals.
When monitoring it I watch the memory tab in Activity Monitor sorting processes by most memory. Safari process sometimes go wild and use 2+GB of RAM on some of the heavier webapps we use at work; generally Firefox and Brave cap out at 500MB and if something is going wrong they'll creep up to 1GB.
Generally I used to have 12 to 20 tabs open at a time but have shifted towards using bookmarks with as few tabs open as I can get away with which has helped Safari but helps FF and Brave that much more. It's really odd as the way Tab Groups are implemented in Safari seems to encourage users to leave many tabs open at a time.
Even then, with only 5 or 6 tabs actually open the memory pressure will be yellow or even red with the system noticeably sluggish and there will be several Safari Web Content (Cached) processes taking hundreds of MB each. When that happens I can quit all of Safari and Memory Pressure immediately drops to the bottom quartile of the green and Swap will clear up too.
Meanwhile on iOS I use Brave which does for me what it seems DDG does for you. For me though it's largely about banishing the banners that demand I download the site's app.
What adblock extensions are you using? I've been using Ghostery as it seems to be lean(ish) and actually works(ish) compared to others I've used.
Also, are you using Profiles and Tab Groups?
The whole set of extensions I use is 1Password, Ghostery, SingleFile, StopTheMadnessPro.
It doesn't feel like it's the extensions creating the issue for me as (it's been a while) I would turn all off all extensions, reboot the machine, and observe the same behavior.
Last edited:
I use ka-block! and hush. Extremely lean and takes care of 90%+ of ads and popups.
Also, I don’t worry about RAM usage too much as that doesn’t affect your browsing experience that much. RAM is meant to be used, that’s why it’s there. IMO what affects lag is mostly CPU/GPU efficiency.
Thanks to you and koelsh for the added observations on browser performance. I use DDG a lot to get away from advertising, but would like to add an ad blocker to Safari. l currently run no extensions on Safari. One of you mentioned ka-block and hush, and the other Ghostery, which i used to use with Firefox on Windows. In your experience what is the single best ad blocker for Safari with minimum performance impact (and preferably not too expensive!)
I know the question is off topic, but since you’re discussing it, I thought I’d ask.
Wipr if you want something that you just install and forget about it.
Adguard is pretty powerful too and which you can tweak to your heart's content.
On iOS/iPadOS Firefox Focus works as a decent content blocker too.
Many thanks! I don’t Don’t do lot of surfing on my phone, but the fact Wipr supports it as well as the Mac is a big plus.
BW