Dump Google Chrome to extend your MacBook's battery life
One of the main benefits to owning a MacBook is the superb battery life. Apple's laptops can work for a great deal of time on battery power alone, thanks in no small part to the numerous improvements made to OS X in recent years. Take my 2013 13-inch MacBook Air for example: it gets well over six hours of battery life on Yosemite, despite being nearly two years old at this stage. I rarely have to worry about plugging it in.
In fact, it could last even longer. The trick is not to use Chrome, which, despite Google's recent efforts to lower its power consumption, continues to be the most power-hungry major browser on OS X, more so than Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox.
According to a test conducted by BatteryBox, on a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, using Safari nets you one more hour of battery life compared to Chrome, the former of which is the most-efficient of the trio. Firefox fares better than Chrome, but it cannot touch Apple's own browser on OS X.
This test is the only one that I have encountered that provides exact battery life results on OS X for all the major browsers. The outcome matches my experience with Chrome and Safari. In my case, the gap in performance is larger, although I have not yet measured it precisely, because the MacBook Air line is designed to deliver longer battery life than the 13-inch Retina MacBook Air, which is more performance-oriented, that was used in the test.
The average battery life, according to the BatteryBox data, is 6 hours and 21 minutes for Safari, 5 hours and 29 minutes for Firefox and 5 hours and 8 minutes for Chrome. Safari consistently ranks as the most energy-efficient browser no matter which website was visited, while Chrome was largely at the opposite end of the spectrum. Hit the link in the second paragraph for the complete breakdown.
Safari is the best option if you want to get the longest battery life while using your MacBook to watch Netflix, YouTube, read your favorite news sites, check your email, see what your friends are doing on social media, look things up on Google, browse Reddit, and more.
At the end of the day, despite Safari's extra boost in the battery life department, Google Chrome will remain the default browser on my MacBook Air. Even though it is more power-hungry, its more powerful feature set, which offers some clear advantages in my case over Safari, makes up for this shortcoming. But, when battery life becomes an issue, I will have no problem switching over to Safari.
Photo Credit: Joe Wilcox