Why does Google Chrome make my rMBA 15 run so much hotter than Safari?

[simon48]

Well that just sucks having to use javascript.

Examples? Well here's one off the top of my head. If you have a few regions with background images and set their background-attachment to fixed, you'll be lucky if it displays any images.

Why? Most of the time you need to use JS all over the place to get IE (and sometimes other browsers) to work the way you want, not to mention all the JS added features.

It's not like you need to move the Chrome only CSS into JS. All you do is run 3 lines of JS to add a ".chrome" class to the body and then run CSS conditionals off of it.

 

[iamfredrik]

Why? Most of the time you need to use JS all over the place to get IE (and sometimes other browsers) to work the way you want, not to mention all the JS added features.

It's not like you need to move the Chrome only CSS into JS. All you do is run 3 lines of JS to add a ".chrome" class to the body and then run CSS conditionals off of it.

Well in my opinion a site should work without JS enabled. JS should only be used for effect.

 

[RMXO]

Chrome isn't very well optimizing OS X. Also if you have a dGPU Chrome will use it way more than it needs to.

Besides being a resource hog that pisses me off also. Esp when using Hangouts for video chat with my girl. My temps jump up like I'm playing a game and sometimes even hotter.

 

[simon48]

Well in my opinion a site should work without JS enabled. JS should only be used for effect.

But that's a blurred line, JS is used for layouts, to add features to browsers, linking elements etc. everywhere, not just for show. On many sites JS is essential to keeping the site looking good, for example if you have a site with a grid of blocks with text wrapping inside them (especially if it's responsive) JS is basically essential for keeping everything straight.

If you do things like this you can still have fallbacks in place if the user doesn't have JS enabled, the whole 1-3% of people.

If you have a simple CSS fix of course you use it, but if don't have a CSS fix and you do have a quick JS fix why not use it and like it?

So you never use things like Modernizr?

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Besides being a resource hog that pisses me off also. Esp when using Hangouts for video chat with my girl. My temps jump up like I'm playing a game and sometimes even hotter.

gfxCardStatus!

 

[RMXO]

But that's a blurred line, JS is used for layouts, to add features to browsers, linking elements etc. everywhere, not just for show. On many sites JS is essential to keeping the site looking good, for example if you have a site with a grid of blocks with text wrapping inside them (especially if it's responsive) JS is basically essential for keeping everything straight.

If you do things like this you can still have fallbacks in place if the user doesn't have JS enabled, the whole 1-3% of people.

If you have a simple CSS fix of course you use it, but if don't have a CSS fix and you do have a quick JS fix why not use it and like it?

So you never use things like Modernizr?

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gfxCardStatus!

yeah i use it and thank god for it.

 

[leman]

Well in my opinion a site should work without JS enabled. JS should only be used for effect.

Why are you so keen to go back to the 90ties? Websites nowadays are full-featured dynamic applications exactly because of ECMAScript!

 

[Montymitch]

Pro: Chrome lets you know which tab has the annoying music playing. Every browser should have this standard.
Con: Chrome absolutely destroys my battery.

 

[priitv8]

Pro: Chrome lets you know which tab has the annoying music playing.

That's been there in Safari as well. At least in it's 7th incarnation.

 

[simon48]

That's been there in Safari as well. At least in it's 7th incarnation.

Really, where/how?

 

[priitv8]

Really, where/how?

Small black triangle on left side of the tab.

 

[skirmisser]

Yep, its a shame that Intel does not expose the Quick Sync APIs under OS X...

This is not true: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/technotes/tn2267/_index.html

HW video acceleration has been exposed to developers as an API since OS X 10.6.3.

No idea why Chrome still does not support it.

 

[iamfredrik]

But that's a blurred line, JS is used for layouts, to add features to browsers, linking elements etc. everywhere, not just for show. On many sites JS is essential to keeping the site looking good, for example if you have a site with a grid of blocks with text wrapping inside them (especially if it's responsive) JS is basically essential for keeping everything straight.

If you do things like this you can still have fallbacks in place if the user doesn't have JS enabled, the whole 1-3% of people.

If you have a simple CSS fix of course you use it, but if don't have a CSS fix and you do have a quick JS fix why not use it and like it?

So you never use things like Modernizr?

JS has it's uses, but it's not necessary for keeping everything straight on a responsive site. Relying on JS for basic layout simply sucks. For responsive layouts I would recommend you start looking into some descent grid system that uses a css preprocessor and let it do all the magic for keeping things straight.

 

[Sym0]

Love chrome, use it in Windows all the time, the business is hosted on Apps so makes perfect sense. Won't touch it in OSX, sucks in OSX.

 

[simon48]

This is not true: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/technotes/tn2267/_index.html

HW video acceleration has been exposed to developers as an API since OS X 10.6.3.

No idea why Chrome still does not support it.

That's not Quick Sync.

JS has it's uses, but it's not necessary for keeping everything straight on a responsive site. Relying on JS for basic layout simply sucks. For responsive layouts I would recommend you start looking into some descent grid system that uses a css preprocessor and let it do all the magic for keeping things straight.

I didn't say to use JS for a basic gird, my example was if you have a standard CSS grid and you have text wrapping in each block, the heights of the blocks are going to be uneven and the grid will break, you can use JS to set all the block's heights to the tallest block's height. This was just a basic need for JS off the top of my head.

A preprocessor won't work for something like this, especially on a responsive site and/or a site with a CMS.

 

[iamfredrik]

I didn't say to use JS for a basic gird, my example was if you have a standard CSS grid and you have text wrapping in each block, the heights of the blocks are going to be uneven and the grid will break, you can use JS to set all the block's heights to the tallest block's height. This was just a basic need for JS off the top of my head.

A preprocessor won't work for something like this, especially on a responsive site and/or a site with a CMS.

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to accomplish. Got a live example? Can't you just use display: table; for that?

 

[cs02rm0]

As a web developer I disagree. In my opinion it is almost as bad as IE6, and it just got worse after they forked webkit.

Are you sure you're a web developer?! Madness, absolute madness...

 

[iamfredrik]

Are you sure you're a web developer?! Madness, absolute madness...

Chrome is the worst browser ever. Right now it is causing me a headache. I have a block of links as images that are displayed inline. Floating the block right works in every other browser, but in chrome the links wrap. Wtf?

 

[simon48]

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to accomplish. Got a live example? Can't you just use display: table; for that?

Well, I'm slightly allergic to the word table. Here's the first example I found and tweaked a little bit.

Chrome is the worst browser ever. Right now it is causing me a headache. I have a block of links as images that are displayed inline. Floating the block right works in every other browser, but in chrome the links wrap. Wtf?

You're kind of proving cs02rm0's case. Just because you're having some issues with Chrome does not make it worse than IE6!

Do you have an JSFiddle of this issue?

 

[skirmisser]

That's not Quick Sync.



I didn't say to use JS for a basic gird, my example was if you have a standard CSS grid and you have text wrapping in each block, the heights of the blocks are going to be uneven and the grid will break, you can use JS to set all the block's heights to the tallest block's height. This was just a basic need for JS off the top of my head.

A preprocessor won't work for something like this, especially on a responsive site and/or a site with a CMS.

Not sure what you mean. Quick Sync is Intel marketing jargon for the HW/GPU H.264 encoder and decoder on board Sandy Bridge and later Intel chips.

VDA is an Apple Framework/API that supports decoding on external GPUs that include the Sandy Bridge or later HW decoders.

FFMPEG, VLC and Adobe Flash Player all support VDA.

Play a youtube video with Safari and check "stats for nerds" on Flash. It says: "accelerated video decoding". And it is a third party Adobe plugin.

Play the same video with Chrome: you will see video decoding is *not* accelerated and the computer heats up like crazy.

Either for lack of resources or for some other purpose (maybe difficult to integrate in their integrated flash player) Chrome does not support HW decoding via VDA.

 

[iamfredrik]

Well, I'm slightly allergic to the word table. Here's the first example I found and tweaked a little bit.

Okay, I'm slightly allergic to using JS for layout. If possible, I would rather use the word table like this: http://jsfiddle.net/jz7ZP/2/

Won't work in <IE7 though. So the JS route would be better if you need to support those.

Note: using table for display is not the same as using actual tables so search engines won't penalise you for this.

You're kind of proving cs02rm0's case. Just because you're having some issues with Chrome does not make it worse than IE6!

Do you have an JSFiddle of this issue?

Does not matter what people think. I just don't like chrome. It's got a lot of issues and it's a memory hog on the Mac. If you're coming from Windows maybe it's the best browser there is, I don't know since I only use Windows for testing, but for the Mac it's utterly crap.

As for my problem, I fixed it by setting min-width on the block, but I don't understand why chrome requires it when no other browser does.

 

[goMac]

In the past few years Chrome has pushed the web forward significantly and due to being very modern and having a large marketshare I'm sure that helped the NYT feel comfortable about putting out a site like this which wouldn't work well on older browsers (like IE8). Without Chrome the marketshare of browsers which could support these types of pages would be much lower right now.

Which doesn't really answer why Chrome is better than Safari, especially in since up until last year Chrome used Apple's code and the Safari engine.

 

[augustya]

I don't know about how good or bad chrome is, but one thing is for sure when I am running Chrome it makes my rMBP hot like a Toaster and I absolutely hate it for that.

So if I wanna watch Flash Video embedded in a browser should I use Chrome or I am better off using some other browser maybe like a Mozilla Firefox or even safari ?

 

[yjchua95]

I don't know about how good or bad chrome is, but one thing is for sure when I am running Chrome it makes my rMBP hot like a Toaster and I absolutely hate it for that.

So if I wanna watch Flash Video embedded in a browser should I use Chrome or I am better off using some other browser maybe like a Mozilla Firefox or even safari ?

Safari, and force YouTube to use the HTML5 player instead.

 

[TonyYYZ]

I was a long time FireFox user and made the permanent switch to Chrome about a year ago. I absolutely love how it keeps all of my bookmarks/shortcuts, extensions, cloud print, and settings synched across all installations of it regardless of platforms.

The extensions are huge for me since I can use apps like PushBullet with my Android devices (I've recently installed this and use it a LOT), Hola for watching any region Netflix while in Canada, Google Voice, AdBlock Plus, etc. I'm a user of Google Apps and it keeps everything integrated nicely and offers very simple to use account management.

Since I'm a first time Mac user with my Haswell rMBP 13 i've found that Chrome does drain my battery like crazy so I'm trying to become familiar with using Safari while on battery. Safari lacks simple shortcuts like pressing Backspace to go back a page, CTRL+Return to populate the www. & .com to a website name in the address bar and it isn't as fast at loading pages. Chrome did use a lot of resources on my Windows 7 PC's as well but I bought this rMBP for its longer battery life and don't want Chrome to suck the life out of it that much faster. Safari is tolerable but is no definite replacement for Chrome. I hope Google optimizes this more for OSX sooner rather than later.

 

[priitv8]

Safari lacks simple shortcuts like pressing Backspace to go back a page...

That's replaced with trackpad gestures. www. prefixes are also not needed. You still need to provide the suffixes.