Google to 'Dramatically' Improve Chrome Impact on Mac Battery Life

[luvbug]

Ads? What ads? I use Brave, and dnscrypt-proxy domain filtering at the exit point of my vpn. Incredibly fast browsing. No (or very little-never say never personal data leakage. FB's catching the well-deserved flack, but Google's right there with them.

 

[NickName99]

I saw Google’s numbers for this - it was still not as good as Safari at battery life with these throttling changes. It will probably never catch up with Safari.

 

[Taipan]

Says a lot about how bad it must be currently, if it can be improved dramatically.

 

[sotov]

Presumably background tabs run in chrome because google can still serve ads to pages in a background tab.

This makes a lot of sense. User switches back to an another tab, but notices a page change; a different ad there. Now the user is faced with a fresh click-through decision.

All this stuff is calculated people. They are super clever and know what they are doing.

 

[mariogt]

Microsoft Edge here, is awesome, fast, and light, also have with some websites better compatibility than Safari.

 

[mi7chy]

This makes a lot of sense. User switches back to an another tab, but notices a page change; a different ad there. Now the user is faced with a fresh click-through decision.

All this stuff is calculated people. They are super clever and know what they are doing.

Ever heard of an adblocker?

 

[hot-gril]

I know a lot of people say ‘just use Safari’ but one of the best and most important features of Chrome for me is multiple accounts and syncing. I have my personal Chrome, business accounts and even my partners account for quick access for her. Rather than having to constantly log out/re login on various websites I can just switch to a different Chrome account without closing or effecting my other account etc.

I just use an entirely separate browser for that, haha. There are so many of them.
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Ads? What ads? I use Brave, and dnscrypt-proxy domain filtering at the exit point of my vpn. Incredibly fast browsing. No (or very little-never say never personal data leakage. FB's catching the well-deserved flack, but Google's right there with them.

Blocking YouTube ads is a moving target. I keep having to change my blocking setup.

 

[Osxguy]

Maybe its my tin hat but why do you guys trust google so much on this macrumors site?

 

[simonmet]

Never seen a website that doesn’t work in Safari, at least not without my content blockers anyway.

 

[sotov]

Ever heard of an adblocker?

Most people don't use ad blockers. For those that do chrome may still be reloading back tabs full pages which doesn't fix the problems outlined in this article. Good effort to appear witty though.

 

[chinito77]

Netscape, IE, Opera, Firefox then Chrome. Never used Safari on my Macs until early last year with a cold switch to Safari. It runs SOOO much faster than Chrome and doesn't throttle my cpu. Only thing I wish Safari had was a built in translate feature but thankfully, that will address soon.

 

[Analog Kid]

At home, I'm just about 100% Safari. On very rare occasions, I'll fall back to Firefox. At work, I use Safari for browsing, but I'm also forced to use Chrome because we're so dependent on the Google Suite because there are some Google tools that only seem to work properly in Chrome (which seems to defeat the whole point of web apps...). I'll have to look into Brave to see if it works well with the Google Suite while being less of a dog.

 

[luvbug]

Blocking YouTube ads is a moving target. I keep having to change my blocking setup.

I solved that by not viewing uBoob, unless absolutely necessary (DIY repair vids, once every year or two). If we all continue to patronize businesses that behave badly, they are likely to continue that behavior. Just sayin'.

 

[TylerL]

I hope Google are working on Chrome for Apple Silicon - to be ready on day one.

All the heavy lifting work has already been done, since many Chromebooks use ARM processors already.
And I doubt that Google would let Safari run away with the market if it all possible. I would be really surprised if Chrome was not ready on day one.

 

[wowotoe]

Switched to Brave and never look back. Less memory footprint, no page ads, and no annoying YouTube ads!!

 

[ArtOfWarfare]

Can we all take a moment to appreciate how great the battle of the desktop web browsers is?

We have Firefox, Chrome, and Safari all battling to be the best web browser AND they all implement the same standards! If only all industries had such effective competition where it was so easy to just swap between competitors!

 

[jchap]

Imagine how much computing power and electricity is wasted by Chrome every day.

Google can say they're green, but efficient software would save more energy than any single action google can do on a corporate level.

That should become a priority for everyone in computing.

Absolutely agreed—well spoken. Software is at the core of energy usage for infotech devices. Improve your software, reduce your energy footprint. I don’t know why this is not more frequently addressed in our world today, but it should be.

 

[star-affinity]

I actually swapped over to Microsoft Edge. I have a 2011 Macbook Pro 15" 16GB ram and 2GHz i7.and it works really good.
It doesnt chew up battery, CPU or Ram. Havent had issues with some pages like Safari does.
Has solid features and its a browser made possible by the Chromium open source project.

Chrome was very slow on my ageing machine but found less errors running some sites. Chrome would zap battery and heat the hardware up and before I knew it fans are running hard.
Safari was ok but load times were average and load site errors on some pages Been using Edge for 12 months and has been a good solid browser and I never thought I would say that.

Microsoft Edge here is awesome, fast, and light, also have with some websites better compatibility than Safari.

Must say I'm also impressed by Edge. Microsoft has done a good job and it also looks good graphically (UI) wise. Microsoft and good looking user interface – a decade or so ago I don't think I could imagine ever saying that. 😆

 

[jamesnajera]

Cool story bro, still using Safari.

 

[Kabeyun]

I only use Chrome when Safari fails. It’s painfully slow, drains enormous amounts of CPU, RAM and battery and it’s goog-ugly.

There are a host of other browsers to fall back on besides Chrome. If my favorite meal isn’t available I don’t have toxins as my second choice.

 

[yukari]

We’ve all heard this before. Let’s see if it actually happens.

Lol do people still use Chrome on Mac?
I abandoned that ship a long time ago...

Number 1 reason I don’t use Chrome, battery, life.

Actually number 2, behind privacy concerns.

All of the above reasons for having abandoned Chrome. It sucks and its privacy is the worst.
I ended up giving MS Edge a try. We shall see. But I tend to use FireFox and Safari most of the time.

 

[iSRS]

Use safari.
If you really need a chromium browser; Use Brave, it's Chrome without the Google spyware.

I actually swapped over to Microsoft Edge. I have a 2011 Macbook Pro 15" 16GB ram and 2GHz i7.and it works really good.
It doesnt chew up battery, CPU or Ram. Havent had issues with some pages like Safari does.
Has solid features and its a browser made possible by the Chromium open source project.

Chrome was very slow on my ageing machine but found less errors running some sites. Chrome would zap battery and heat the hardware up and before I knew it fans are running hard.
Safari was ok but load times were average and load site errors on some pages Been using Edge for 12 months and has been a good solid browser and I never thought I would say that.

Microsoft Edge here is awesome, fast, and light, also have with some websites better compatibility than Safari.

Came here to say the same. Been very impressed by Edge since the new release. I use it for OneDrive. I may try it for a site that suggests Firefox or Chrome for taking my exams.

 

[NufSaid]

I enjoy using chrome on my Mac but the battery life in memory hit is too much this is welcome news

 

[davidhunter51]

Google will address long-standing battery life issues, particularly on Mac devices, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Chrome will improve "tab throttling" by better prioritizing active tabs and limiting resource drain from tabs open in the background. This is said to have a "dramatic impact on battery and performance." Google has reportedly been performing early tests on Mac laptops in particular.

"This is an ongoing investment in improvements to speed, performance and battery life," said Max Christoff, director of Chrome browser engineering. Chrome has previously been criticized for poor use of RAM, battery draining, and privacy concerns.

In May, Google set out plans to improve Chrome battery toll by blocking resource-heavy ads. Chrome will also limit the resources that an ad can use before the user interacts with it. In addition to this, Chrome will soon be updated with new optimization that will allow the most performance-critical parts of the software to run even faster.

Google is currently experimenting with the changes, with the intention of releasing the optimizations and improvements to Chrome in a stable release towards the end of August.

Article Link: Google to 'Dramatically' Improve Chrome Impact on Mac Battery Life

Some business apps require Chrome, and if your company uses GSuite, employees are going to want to use Chrome. My only wish is that we could lockdown the browser and limit the open tabs to about 12. So many employees have two dozen tabs open and complain about "slow laptops". Ugh.

 

[iSRS]

The fans on my 16” go bonkers with Chrome. About the only time they go on.