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Chrome vs Safari for Battery Life

D

dingclancy

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 4, 2011
19
0
Hello all,

Proud new convert from here. Loving my 13" MBA

Anyway, I have been reading a lot about battery life and I noticed the battery drains much faster if you have Chrome open than using Safari.

I love Chrome for its speed and extensions. It is also the only Windows-based workflow that I really like. However, shutting down Chrome and using Safari gives me at least 2 hrs more battery life.

Is it just me or is my observation correct?
 
It's just you.

Time yourself, and you'll see that Chrome is just about as much of a battery-sucker as Safari. At least under Lion.

Now, if you were on Snow Leopard, it is true that running Safari instead of Chrome would net you at least 2 hours. Provided you don't run Flash, that is.
 
both are battery life sucker, but what annoys me about safari is this thing keeps reloading all the damn tabs!

:mad::mad::mad:
 
I use safari. With safari, mail and twitter open I have had >7hrs battery life, sometimes 8 hours. I have click2flash too, which helps. I can get really good life out of mine, and it is the ultimate 13"
 
Chrome has flash built in so if you have tabs where flash frames are playing of course if will drain more battery. Enable "click-to-play" for plugins and the battery life will be much closer to Safari.
 
I uninstalled Flash player and seriously get double the battery life that I used to. Since Chrome has Flash preinstalled I only use it if I need to watch videos that I can't get Safari to convert into HTML5. Even with Click to Flash turned on in Chrome, I get about 2 hours less battery life when using it as opposed to Safari. I'm running the beta Safari 5.2 on Lion and, in my opinion, it runs just as fast as Chrome.

Apple is really taking Safari places. It manages memory and CPU well, while still being fast. Without Flash, I love Safari. Just install the YouTube5 plugin and you'll be happy to have left Chrome behind :) Processor even runs about 10 degrees CELSIUS cooler with Safari as opposed to Chrome.
 
Safari is much better, especially with 15 and 17 inch MacBook Pro, Chrome will automatically switch it to the powerful graphic card. (I know you can get an app to "Force" the Mac to Intel, but for the average users they don't know about this :)

For the Air shouldn't make a lot of different

Personally I prefer Safari mainly because it is Apple app, and it Sync my bookmarks with iCloud across all my iOS devices and the smooth gesture on OS X Lion :)

Just my 2 cents.
 
I used Safari exclusively until they updated to 5, but then switched to Chrome because I didn't like the way the pages rendered when I went back or forward.

That being said, I haven't noticed a difference in battery life at all between the two.
 
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