Chrome Drains Your MacBook Battery. MacBook battery life has been a huge feature for Apple in. On the desktop: Brave uses the same browser engine as Chrome, meaning it has the same security-holes as Chrome. Chrome is a big target for hackers (being the most popular browser in the world), and a webpage that will hack Chrome may also hack Brave. However, Brave has security features that Chrome doesn't (such as a built-in adblocker). I have compared the cpu usage of 3 browsers (safari, chrome, firefox) on my mac. I came to the conclusion that apple handicapes firefox and chrome when it comes to watching videos on youtube. Google Chrome and Safari are two popular browsers. If you are a mac-user, you might have used both browsers, and it doesn’t take long.
When it comes to setting up your Mac these days, there are only two browsers most people consider: Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome. But in Safari vs Chrome, who wins the title of best Mac browser? We dig in and find out.
These days, there are really only three web browser of note on OS X: Safari, which is produced by Apple and pre-installed by default on every Mac, Google’s Chrome, which in recent years has become the web’s darling on PC, Mac, and mobile devices, and Mozilla’s Firefox, which started the original battle to kill off Internet Explorer but has since fallen in the rankings.
For the most part, the battle comes down to Safari vs Chrome – Safari is pre-installed, and Google leverages their historically large web presence to sell users on Chrome. There are pluses and minuses to each browser – is one truly better than the other? Let’s take a look.
Best Mac Browser – Safari vs Chrome: Performance
On newer hardware, the sorts of optimizations that these companies make to speed up their browsers, they’re just not that noticeable. Safari wins most of the benchmarks – often by a substantial margin – but you’ll find it doesn’t make much of a difference in terms of everyday use.
There are some things that Safari does objectively better than Chrome. A lot of them have to do with the way the browser feels more than it actually works. Scrolling on webpages is usually smoother than on Safari; Chrome will scroll just as fast, but it’ll feel just a bit coarser, like when a game drops a few frames. This is most noticeable when you zoom in and out using the pinch-to-zoom gestures on one of Apple’s trackpads.
It’s not a unilateral Safari win, though. There are occasional performance hiccups that are difficult to get around – occasionally Safari will just hang when loading a page, for reasons that are difficult to troubleshoot. Sometimes, I can enter an address in Safari and before Safari loads the page, I can open Chrome, navigate to the same address, see the page load, and start interacting. It’s frustrating, but it happens rarely enough that it’s not a fatal flaw.
Best Mac Browser – Safari vs Chrome: Battery Life
You might have seen some stories talking about how Chrome is a notorious energy hog – because frankly it is. You don’t even need to do a series of battery tests to understand the difference the two browsers have on your Mac’s battery life.
Apple includes a handy tool within OS X for illustrating the degree to which the applications you use decrease your battery life. To see it for yourself, all you need to do is click on the battery icon in the menu bar at the top of your screen.
In the drop-down menu that appears, there are two relevant sections. If you’re on battery power, you’ll see a time until battery depletion at the top (here, this MacBook is plugged in, so it says Battery Is Charged, instead). Switching from Chrome to Safari often has an immediate impact on the number you see here. If you’re working in the web browser (or just browsing Reddit – hey, we don’t judge), you can see this number jump just by closing Chrome and resuming your work in Safari.
There’s a second section titled Apps Using Significant Energy. Depending on what you’re doing at the moment, you might find that this section is empty, or it might be full of apps. Safari will appear here, too, but even when doing the same activity, Chrome will pop up more often.
This power hogging is something that users have long called out Google for, and it’s something that the company has worked to mitigate – it’s better now than it used to be, but it just isn’t there yet. Part of it has to with how Chrome uses your MacBook’s processor; it wakes it up more often than it really needs to, ostensibly in the name of performance. The other part of it has to do with how Apple builds Safari. For them, battery life is an absolute priority, and it shows. Safari takes its energy optimizations seriously, and does things like shutting off GIFs or plugins as soon as you scroll past or switch to another tab.
Best Mac Browser – Safari vs Chrome: Extensions
We won’t spend too much time on this section, not because it isn’t important – it absolutely is – but because the battle is so absolutely one-sided. Chrome wins the extensions war hands-down. Apple has actually gotten much, much better in the last couple of years; while Safari has supported the development of browser extensions for a long time, it used to be a dire wasteland.
These days, you’ll find most of the biggest extensions (or the extensions of the biggest sites) will have options for Safari, but in comparison to Chrome, there isn’t much else. Chrome will let you install an extension to do just about anything you can want, and they’re all organized in an easy-to-use library online.
Best Mac Browser – Safari vs Chrome: Which should you use?
So after all this, is there a clear winner? Does Safari’s energy use put it above Chrome, or does Chromes flexibility beat out what Safari can do? Honestly, the answer is that you should keep both installed on your Mac. The two browsers honestly complement each other pretty well.
Your mobile devices can influence which browser you should use, as well. If you’re a dyed in the wool Safari-on-iOS user, you might find the ability to open your Mac’s Safari tabs on your iPhone or iPad worth the exclusivity. The same can be said if you use Android or even Chrome on iOS.
In my experience, this isn’t as useful as it seems like it should be – once you’ve logged into your various accounts on your Mac or your mobile device, it’s little trouble to switch between the two; and given how strong the apps from individual websites can be these days, it’s rare that you really need to open a tab on your phone that you were just navigating on your Mac.
What has become a regular habit for me is to simply use each browser based on where I am. If I’m at home with the MacBook plugged in, I’ll stick to using Chrome – Safari’s page hangs are rare, but infuriating when they happen. If I’m on the go, however, battery life is a much more important consideration, and I’ll fire Safari up, instead.
Chrome and Safari are ultimately much more alike than they are different. If you haven’t used one in favor of the other, you should try and exclusively use it for a week – you might be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
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Google Chrome’s overwhelming popularity on macOS is quite a feat for a non-default browser, but it makes sense. In its early days, Chrome had a reputation for being lightweight and fast. It was better than Safari and Firefox, people said.
It may have been true then, but not true anymore. Safari beats Chrome because it’s more energy-efficient, better at protecting your privacy, and obviously, works with the Mac environment better. Here’s why you should avoid using Google Chrome on Mac.
1. Chrome Drains Your MacBook Battery
MacBook battery life has been a huge feature for Apple in recent releases of macOS. Mavericks brought energy impact measuring tools to the operating system, which you can find by clicking the battery icon in your menu bar.
If you’ve got Chrome running, Chrome will often show up here. Because of this, if battery life is important to you, avoid using Chrome on your MacBook.
Google is reportedly working on the issue, and has made progress, but the job is far from finished. And you don’t have to take my word for it: open up the Activity Monitor on your Mac, then head to the Energy section. Open some tabs in Chrome and the same ones in another browser—Chrome will almost always use more energy for the same job.
2. Chrome Works in Its Own Way
Unlike Safari, many of Chrome’s features have their roots in ChromeOS, as opposed to macOS. This leads to a less than ideal experience.
Most Mac apps close instantly when you hit Cmd + Q; Chrome, by default, makes you hold the combo for a while (though you can turn that feature off). Most Mac apps have their own preferences window; Chrome uses a website in a tab for that.
Chrome is also slower to catch up with macOS features. macOS Mojave introduced Dark Mode in September 2018, which Safari supported out of the gate. But Chrome didn’t respect this feature until March 2019—half a year later. Safari also has a feature that will turn supporting websites dark, whereas you have to install a Chrome extension for this.
The old notification system was also a mess. Chrome used its own notification setup that didn’t integrate with the Notification Center. Thankfully this is no longer the case, but it was a huge pain for far too long.
Obviously, it’s less than ideal to force a user to learn an entirely separate interface when they’re used to one already. Safari uses the same buttons and symbols as the rest of macOS, which leads to a more seamless experience.
3. Chrome Extensions Come With a Price
It’s true that in the head-to-head showdown of Chrome vs. Safari, Chrome is the clear winner when it comes to extensions. Even so, a big extension library comes with a price.
One of the main reasons Chrome uses so much of your CPU and drains so much of your battery life is due to installed extensions. Extensions can also introduce privacy problems, as many of them need extensive access to your browsing. As great as extensions often are, their strain on your system can be a high price.
If there are a few you can’t live without, don’t forget that Safari has plenty of great extensions too.
4. Google Is Watching You
While Google and Apple’s interests might seem like they overlap, the companies are structured quite differently. Google’s revenue is primarily ad-based, which means that as the user, you aren’t really the customer; you’re the product. Google only makes money if it can somehow acquire information about you to sell.
While you can tweak Chrome to protect your privacy to some degree, you’ll never be completely safe with a company whose business model is built on obtaining your data.
If that sounds Orwellian to you, Chrome on Mac probably isn’t for you.
5. Apple Watches You Less
Chrome Vs Safari For Ipad
Apple’s business model is based on selling you, the user, its hardware. Its software is usually free, and is only valuable as much as it makes Apple hardware more attractive to the customer. The company has a more direct incentive to provide you with a browser that works well with other Apple products.
As a sign of this good faith, Apple introduced a whole suite of privacy protection measures in macOS Mojave. Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2 (ITP 2) is an update to a feature introduced in High Sierra that attempts to combat cross-site tracking, making it harder for websites to follow you on the web. It also attempts to scrub fingerprinting, which makes it harder for websites to identify you in the future.
6. No Chrome Support Below Yosemite
Chrome’s system requirements cut off any Mac that’s below macOS Yosemite. Sure, you can update your Mac free of charge, but many people don’t want to for a variety of reasons. This includes people on older computers that don’t support the latest version of macOS.
7. Safari Is Actually Really Good
For a long time, the collective response to the above points was “Sure, but nothing is better”. However, recent versions of Safari are faster, sleeker, and better than Chrome.
Seriously, if you haven’t tried this browser out for a while, you don’t know what you’re missing. Even the extension ecosystem has come a long way; the most common tools are already waiting for you. It’ll be an adjustment, but you’ll never look back. Try some essential Safari tips and tricks to get acquainted again.
8. Safari’s Reader Mode Is Great
Have you ever tried to read an article, but couldn’t get past the ads? Safari’s Reader mode cuts through all the bad formatting, strange fonts, and ad splash pages to deliver what you came for: pure, streamlined text. Images, videos, and links are included, all in an easy-to-read format.
9. Safari Integrates Better With the Apple Ecosystem
If you’re all-in with the Apple platform, Safari is the better choice. All the little aspects just integrate better: your passwords, for example, are managed by Apple’s system-wide tool and synced using iCloud. The same goes for your Bookmarks. Continuity with iOS only works with Safari.
If you use an iPhone or iPad, Handoff allows you to go to a site on Safari on your mobile device, pick up your Mac, and go immediately to the same site.
You Can Always Try Another Browser
Safari Or Chrome
Though the Chrome vs. Safari debate includes the two heavyweights of the Mac browser battle, there are other options. If you dislike both browsers, you can always look to our list of best alternative browsers for Mac users. Why not check out some of Opera’s coolest features and give a lesser-known browser a chance?
Is Chrome Better Than Safari
Read the full article: Safari vs. Chrome for Mac: 9 Reasons You Shouldn’t Use Chrome