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Want to get more battery life on your 2011 MBA? Get rid of Safari.

plumosa

plumosa

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 17, 2007
178
9
Australia
I have been frustrated beyond belief from the low battery life on my new 11" i5 MBA. It was, at most, getting 3 hours of battery life even with the backlit keyboard and bluetooth off, and the display on the lowest setting. I have click2flash installed as well as adblock+.

The only thing I was doing that was processor intensive was running both firefox and safari at the same time.

My page outs are already at 7.92 GB!! so I decided that I would try out running opera instead of safari----and what a difference that made!

I got over ONE HOUR longer just from switching browsers!

Why is it that Safari, the native browser produced by Apple is such a memory hog? You would think that it would be optimised from OSX...


Well anyways, I hope this helps out some of you looking for better battery lives!
 
miles01110 said:
How do you know it was Safari hogging the RAM?
Click to expand...

Because when I got slow downs and forced quit Safari in Activity Monitor, I got half to 3/4th of my memory suddenly free, whilst quitting Firefox only opened up 1/4th of it.
 
I've considered using Chrome but I'm in love with Safari's back/forward animation when using the two-finger gesture. Is there an extension that will enable this animation in Chrome?
 
maclook said:
I've considered using Chrome but I'm in love with Safari's back/forward animation when using the two-finger gesture. Is there an extension that will enable this animation in Chrome?
Click to expand...

I don't think so...and I had to turn on three finger swipes to be able to go back/forward in Chrome/Firefox on Lion. :\
 
Macman45 said:
Safari and am getting 6 to 7 hours of battery time on my MBA 13" two browsers open is bound to use more battery life anyway.

OP have you installed coconut battery?
Click to expand...

It seems to be much more of an issue in the 11 inchers, than with the 13s. I was consistantly using up all of my 4 GB of RAM (hence the 7.92 GB of page outs) running both firefox and safari. But now with Firefox and Opera, I still have almost half of my memory not being used.

The only change is swapping to Opera from Safari.

And yes, I have installed Cononut battery, and it doesn't seem to work properly with the new airs as it says it is 7 months old (not possible), but my battery health with both that and iStat is very good. 99% for iStat, capacity of 4634 out of 4680 for coconut.
 
Chrome supports back/forward 2-finger swipe. It has a nice little arrow as the animation that swings across the screen. Doesn't give you a peek like Safari though. Also doesn't support tap to zoom. Full-screen creates its own space, but it's a little wonky compared to Safari.

I still use it though. Search bar built into the address bar > then slight disadvantages
 
I certainly believe you are getting an extra hour of web browsing, but I have my doubts it has anything to do with your web browser choice. Your battery is significantly affected by "how" you use your computer, not just what programs you are using.

When I use Safari as if my computer is plugged into the wall, I'll get about 5 hours of battery life. However, with a few adjustments to how I browse the internet, I can visit the exact same web sites and get an extra 2 hours.

Run full screen. Do not endlessly scroll around. Physically sit on your hands if you have to. Read your web page top to bottom (or whatever is of interest to you). Only after you are done, need to scroll another page, or click a link, can you touch your macbook air. Once you get used to the adjustment, you don't have to sit on your hands anymore. :p
 
maclook said:
I've considered using Chrome but I'm in love with Safari's back/forward animation when using the two-finger gesture. Is there an extension that will enable this animation in Chrome?
Click to expand...

Hey I'm wondering... if 2 fingers does back/forward, how do you scroll horizontally in a page?
 
If the page is that large that it doesn't fit left/right (I always resize using Command + or -) then when you hit the edge in two finger scrolling left or right it will go forward/back a page in your browsing.

I just tested it now. I use Chrome as my default w/ Safari running on a 2nd space when I need Java runtime...
 
orfeas0 said:
Hey I'm wondering... if 2 fingers does back/forward, how do you scroll horizontally in a page?
Click to expand...

First you scroll to the maximum of the horizontal scroll, then you start to pull the present screen away to reveal the previous screen.

Edit: Risasi - exactly. I loaded a bunch of tabs and didn't see your response before posting.
 
mrsir2009 said:
You shouldn't have to scroll horizontally in a webpage page unless its screwed up.
Click to expand...

Well, sometimes I have 2 windows open side by side on my MBP13 if say, I want to watch a netflix movie while while browsing and that second browser window almost always needs a horizontal scroll. This often results in a frustrating back and forth that only seems to have begun recently, is the 2-finger back and forth relatively new to chrome?
 
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