Reducing open browser tabs dropped CPU core temperature by 5 degrees on my MacBook Pro

[pshufd]

I have been running with about 9 pinned tabs to fairly heavyweight websites so I removed them and added them to the bookmarks bar so that I have access to them but have to reload them when I want to see them. I had added two tabs and I notice that my thermals were worse. The two tabs have maps of AQI and wildfires in North America. Typical CPU at idle is also down a couple of percent and RAM use went down 3-4 GB.

I still have 3 remaining pinned tabs but they aren't noisy but I do use them more often than the ones I removed. I think that a lot of people like to keep a ton of tabs open but there may be a performance cost to doing so, even with Apple Silicon.

 

[Longplays]

Is it Chrome? Safari shows a warning sign when a website consumes more power than the set threshold.

 

[pshufd]

Is it Chrome? Safari shows a warning sign when a website consumes more power than the set threshold.

Firefox. I was just a bit surprised at how much they used. I considered them backup processes but I guess that they are more than that. At any rate, I'll just use them on demand.

 

[Tagbert]

I use Firefox and don't see this much. Most of the tabs I have open don't seem to run processes in the background. Gmail was one pinned tab that did do regular background processes but I recently switched to Mimestream for my gmail and don't keep that in the browser anymore.

 

[NT1440]

Firefox. I was just a bit surprised at how much they used. I considered them backup processes but I guess that they are more than that. At any rate, I'll just use them on demand.

Also consider, are you using an ad blocker?

 

[pshufd]

Also consider, are you using an ad blocker?

Yes. Ublock Origin. I guess that it gets run when additional stuff gets pulled down and I suppose that that could be expensive. Ublock Origin should make the initial load faster but it is possible that it's expensive on a tab that updates in the background regularly.

I've found that I don't miss the tab being already loaded and this is a way to run a bit more on the lightweight side.

 

[Wizec]

Nice thing about Edge is the auto sleeping of background tabs. I only ever have about 12-20 tabs open, and I find that Edge does a great job of sleeping the ones I’m not using.

 

[pshufd]

I've replaced open browser tabs with bookmark favicon on the bookmark toolbar. I really like this approach as it just loads the page on demand rather than it updating automatically. It also reduces RAM usage as well. I do have a few tabs that I autoreload during the day but those don't have much of an impact.