“We’ve seen before that changing from Chrome to Safari can make a big difference on your Mac’s battery life,” John Brownlee reports for The Cult of Mac.
“But if you haven’t switched from Chrome or Firefox to Safari yet, this fact might change your mind: if you’re a MacBook user, you’re losing an average of 1 hour of total battery life by using anything but Safari,” Brownlee reports. “The battery experts over at The Batterybox ran Chrome, Safari, and Firefox through a series of tests to determine which browser was most battery-efficient.”
Averaging data from all websites tested, Safari won first place with 6hours 21min of total usage, Firefox second with 5hours 29min of usage, and Chrome last with 5hours 8min of usage. Basically, if you simply switch to using Safari instead of Chrome, on average you could get an extra 1 hour of usage from your battery life. — Batterybox
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: No contest.
But Chrome has such a cool name and Safari sucks and if Google makes it , it must be better at searches and bla bla bla.
Actual reasons I have heard from users. Users are stupid.
They should just buy a “Chromebook” to fully realize their delusion… 🙂
Those users might as well bend over and let the evil overlords of goople reach in and rip your very soul for their amusement… lol
I can watch Netflix streaming videos without a hitch with Chrome, but Safari often lags. This was a tip from Netflix.
@ Think
Try to lift yourself above Ad Hominem attacks.
Also, you’re sidestepping the question. It isn’t stupid reasons but browser performance.
But you know that, don’t you?
I only use the stupid chrome as second choice to open stupid sites.
I have a 2009 MacBook Pro, outfitted with an SSD drive and holding strong… but… on this computer, Chrome is so much faster than Safari. I’ve tried going back to Safari, but it’s noticeably slower loading pages. Does anyone else observe Chrome being a lot faster? Or is just because I’m older gear?
I also have a 2009 MacBook Pro, but a standard hard drive with Yosemite installed. Safari is almost unusable on my machine. Chrome works so much better. It’s my backup machine, so I haven’t really done a lot of troubleshooting, so I just open the Chrome browser and forget about Safari. For whatever reason, Safari doesn’t appear to like the 2009 MBP.
same here. Chrome load pages faster than Safari on my MacBook Air
Chrome is faster, frequently a lot faster.
Safari hangs up or slows a lot on my MBP from last year. But Safari has two features that make me loyal. First, web site pages store as one item, not the page and the data/photos. Smart. Second, Reader View is indispensable for more and more sites. Ads aren’t the problem but the aggressive GIF ads and intentionally hideous ones. Reader View kills all that.
Chrome is still the better overall browser. News sites just “appear out of nowhere” because of the speed.
Safari all day long…
I have Firefox installed, but hardly used. Chrome is not allowed on my computer. Not a single bit of “spy” code…. unwanted.
Actually if you use anything, other than Safari, try Opera.
This is my exact stance.
I’ll use firefox from time to time, but Safari works better for me.
Same here; Safari on my 2010 MacBook Pro and Firefox as a backup. No Chrome, no Flash, no Flip4Mac and AdBlock.
Works like a dream, pages load quickly and my bookmarks etc. are synced with my iPhone & iPad.
I’m testing El Capitan Public Beta and Safari is even better than Yosemite.
I recently looked at opera as Firefox has been getting flakier by the release to the point of uselessness. I downloaded opera and found it to be vastly improved since the last time I tried it. The only thing I miss from FF is the ability to view my bookmarks in the sidebar. Opera was just as fast and snappy as Chrome without the Google creepiness.
Pale Moon is excellent as well.
I’ll stick with Firefox and adBlock Plus.
You can get Adblock Plus for Safari from Apple.
In Safari go to “Safari” in the menu bar and select “Safari Extensions”.
Plenty of extensions to choose from.
Adblock Plus –
https://extensions.apple.com/details/?id=org.adblockplus.adblockplussafari-GRYYZR985A
I use the ClickToPlugin extension. It prevents Flash-based ads from running, which are what bog down the system when doing general web surfing with a lot of web pages open at once. Static ads are fine, and allow web sites like MDN to earn revenue…
It also makes YouTube (and some other web sites) give me the HTML5 version of the video (by default), instead of Flash, and provides a right-click menu command to “Download Video.”
@ken1w: If you have ClickToPlugin installed, you’re telling Web sites that you have Flash installed. The last thing you want to do is encourage them…
By the way, I do not have Flash on my system at all. I have *full* access to youtube video.
Does that fancy new Netflix interface use Flash? If it doesn’t, I might uninstall Flash myself. But Hulu still seems to need Flash.
It’s becoming more irrelevant, actually. I’ve been watching Netflix, Hulu, and even YouTube more on my Apple TV recently (since buying one recently). For the last few years, I’ve had no first-hand problems or annoyances from having Flash installed my Mac, thanks to the ClickToPlugin extension. Well, except for the too frequent need to install Flash Player updates from Adobe. 🙂
As of Yosemite, Netflix can run in safari natively thanks to additional drm extensions built in, no flash required.
I uninstalled Flash from Safari and my Mac.
I do have Chrome installed, but I only use it in backup instances where there is an issue with Safari support or need of Flash. I run it while making sure it’s not logged into anything. Chrome has it’s own version of Flash sandboxed inside which is isolated from everything else. It allows me to be Flash free in Safari and for the most part my entire Mac, but still have back-up if absolutely necessary.
As per a post I made last week, what you want is the original AdBlock from Michael Gundlach. I’ve never seen the point of AdBlock Plus except as a ripoff of AdBlock. It also has a reputation of selling itself off to advertisers in order to allow their ads to make it through the AdBlock Plus wall.
This “editorial” was probably sponsored by the Advertisers of America.
Why?
Install Ad Block plus and its Element Hiding Helper into Firefox and start enjoying the internet without ads sliding all over your screen.
I can get more than an extra hour of work in by avoiding all the sleazy ads.
I have a better idea: Uninstall Flash.
Agreed. And Chrome has a built in flash engine, so if you have a couple websites that need Flash – just launch it for those sites.
Chrome has other “built-in” features that make me steer well clear of that browser.
Check your activity monitor when chrome isn’t running… are there any processes running with Google in the name?
Exactly. Google spyware sucks.
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/google-chrome-helper/
I wonder what this process is doing to consume all your free CPU cycles?
One Firefox feature I neglected to mention.
Firefox unlike Safari remembers your preferred text size for Websites. (Command+ or Command -)
Chrome is just used to upload your porn site habits directly to the NSA.
I’ve personally never seen the point of Chrome, although I do participate in the Chromium beta tests. As for Firefox, it has functionality that can run rings around Safari. I always have it handy. But my main browser is of course Safari. Apple continues to do a very good job with it, despite the quirks.
To use Flash I use Chrome..
I actually use all 3 web browsers, due to some websites that have compatibility issues with certain browsers.
IE I won’t touch with a 10-foot pole.
My friend is asking if the same is true for Safari for Windows.
I only use Safari on my MacBook Air. I love the “reader view”.
I really dunno how Firefox dropped out of the convo among the technorati. Granted, it had dropped far behind a few years back, but by me is now pretty fully back in the game and staying there.
Granted, it’s still a memory hog, but no worse than Chrome (if you can add up all of the myriad processes Chrome spawns to even tell); it has by far the best developed extension ecosystem (I keep it for the Cool Previews add-on alone); syncs everything I want synced between my devices, now integrates with Pocket for things I don’t necessarily want to import into Evernote, etc., and so forth. Plus I like the list of open tabs drop-down better than Safari’s window avatar display. and that tab names on screen don’t get partly to wholly covered up.
And it’s still open source.
I’ve just never been able to warm up to Safari. Plus, change for the sake of change also seldom appeals – why should the tabs close on the other edge, e.g.
Anyway, I use Safari as my second browser and do note it’s thriftier with memory and affects battery life less (so would select it on an expedition where I’m far from recharge juice), but these are not the only considerations in choosing a browser.
Can someone explain why cookies keep reappearing after I’ve deleted them? Even if “Block cookies” is checked they inevitably come back. This doesn’t seem to happen with Firefox. What’s going on and what can I do about it? Thx.
I’ve been using Safari, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Vivaldi. I’ve uninstalled Flash from my 2011 17″ MBP. My MBP has max 8GB of RAM. Safari, refuses to play on websites without flash. When a website gives the option of flash or QT, it does not automatically recognize QT. All the other browser would work without flash. From slowest to fastest, firefox, opera, chrome, and vivaldi. The problem I have with vivaldi is that it still looks like a work in progress.
When I re-installed flash, Safari is fastest browser for me. Followed by Chrome, Vivaldi, Opera, and Firefox. This is not scientific by any means. However, based on my usage, that is the result I’m getting.
Well, I have to have Firefox and safari on my desktop (most of my fed gov’t-required web apps won’t work with safari -training, time sheet, tech reporting, ID & access management, etc… ) That’s the Fed’s fault, not Apple’s. The Fed is at least 5-10 years behind in IT usability. Most of the web apps behave like Windows 95. As for my laptop, Safari won’t work at all since I upgraded to 10.10. So I can only use Firefox. … and Chrome does nothing for me.
Using Safari for government time sheets is a work in progress at best. It works about 80 percent of the time for me. Totally agree on your assessment though concerning how far behind the government is when it comes to IT.
Safari on Mac is better than it was, but still gets unstable if you do not empty the cache during long browsing sessions with lots of tabs. I contend the problem arose with the aggressive caching of sites, favorites, top sites, etc.
I wish Apple would allow us to turn off top sites on Safari for Mac. Also, clearing history often dumps cookies allowing expedited login on subscription sites, banking sites, etc.
We should be able to dump the cache and cruft cookies without losing cookies from sites we regularly use. I am sure there are people at Apple who could make this happen.
Mobile Safari needs to kill the feature allows webpages to launch apps. This is the whack a mole problem MDN is always fighting.