Using Safari On A MacBook Helps Improve Battery Life

Chrome is a great browser, especially if you’re a heavy user of Google’s products and services. However its performance on Apple’s OS X platform is not particularly great and it has been found to be something of a battery drain. Now if you’re looking to extend the battery life of your MacBook, then perhaps switching to Safari would be a better idea.

Before you think we’re getting paid by Apple to promote Safari/bash Chrome, we’re not. This is based on actual numbers conducted by the folks at Battery Box where they found that using Safari will actually help improve your MacBook’s battery life. This was discovered after one of their colleagues was experiencing much better battery life after making the switch, and they decided to put it to the test.

According to their method, “We measured the power consumption of watching videos on YouTube, browsing Reddit, streaming on Netflix vs Putlocker, creeping on Twitter and FaceBook, composing emails on services like Gmail and Hotmail, and searching for stuff on Google, Bing (yup, surprisingly, it’s still used), and DuckDuckGo. We used a factory-restored MacBook Pro Retina 13” to test each website on one internet browser at a time. No programs other than the browser were open.”

As you can see in the graph above based on the various tests, the average time of battery using Safari was about an hour more than if you had used Chrome. To be specific, using Safari saw the MacBook’s battery life last for 6 hours 21 minutes. Firefox lasted for 5 hours and 29 minutes, while Chrome saw the laptop last 5 hours and 8 minutes.

Of course all of this will boil down to personal preference. Maybe you prefer Chrome for its other features, its UI, and etc., and that’s fair, so if you constantly have access to a power point to charge your MacBook, then we suppose this will be a non-issue. However if you’re constantly lamenting at your laptop’s battery life, maybe switching to a different browser could be a good start.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Computers
Tags: Chrome, Google, Macbook, safari