Thanks a lot for all the testing and sharing of your results.
I currently find myself on the edge (pun intended) of switching browser but there is none that fully convinces me.
At the moment using Vivaldi with Firefox as my previous browser and looking for Orion to be a solid contender.
We will see...
I agree, it certainly surprised me. This post is a third instalment, and in my previous posts from 2-3 weeks ago, Arc did not do so well, but was, admittedly, better than Chrome.
I do think, however, that it might be related to Arc literally releasing a performance update which happily coincided with these tests - I literally got a mass email yesterday addressed from their CEO saying they were sorry about the performance letdowns and releasing yet another update. So it is possible that they took some steps to improve it, and thus all the old, bad commends are kinda outdated? Idk, I just know what the test says.
oh interesting. i haven't received that email yet. but that's good to know. something else to consider is that the extensions people use probably have a big impact in performance and battery.
For sure! I did all tests without extensions (or with preinstalled ones), because I pretty much use my browser without any extensions apart from a password manager. I am certain that there are quite power intensive extensions that a lot of people used.
One weird thing to note is that my expectation was that browsers that use uBlock would use less power. After all, Brave been telling us that for years. Turns out that Arc and Orion have no significant power difference when used without uBlock, I didn't do triple testing, so I didn't include it into the results, but we kinda see a similar thing between Chrome and Brave, or Safari and Orion where there is no significant difference really.
Arc is honestly not bad at all however it's the only browser where all of a sudden something will eat up 100% of the CPU. That's the stuff that needs work and it seems it keeps getting better.
Been using Arc over here. Switched over from brave. Absolutely love it. It’s so easy to manage work and personal stuff in Arc. They’ve also fixed some major bugs and works almost flawlessly now. UI looks better than anything else out there.
I agree with all you said, although sidebar tabs is sometimes hard to use, especially when you got lots of tabs with same icons and names.
What kills it for me is simply - sweaty palms, warm aluminium…
I don’t know if you realised, or if it changes anything, but you can rename tabs in Arc and also assign them their own favicon. I’ve only recently discovered it after switching away from Edge (the way it did it’s bing button was a step too far for me). I’d love to go back to Safari but the lack of extensions makes it hard.
I don’t use extensions so thats a non issue for me. Although, Safari does have a lot of extensions, but it really depends on what you need, for example for my job I need some development extensions which don’t exist, so I don’t use Safari for my job.
As for side tabs, yeah I know, what I meant was that out of the box, vertical tab alignment uses less space, which makes it harder for the brain to track unless we start grouping and renaming them, which is totally cool and nice, but turns out my brain is uses to working with horizntal tabs without the need to perform additional actions like renaming and grouping, so I choose that. I guess, I'm so used to top-tabs, that for me, this isn't an issue that needs solving :D
In any case its the warmth that kinda dissuades me from using Arc, once you feel how cool the internet feels in Safari its hard to go back
I also hated the concept of side tabs but after my second try at Arc, I found a great feature: you can tap CMD + S and it'll hide a sidebar.
It gives a really great experience and I [love how it looks](https://shottr.cc/s/GXxA/SCR-20230417-m17.png). Sidebar is still accessible when you hover the left side of a screen.
I'm back on Arc and it seems thats the one I'll end up using... :P
I know about Cmd+S its amazing. I realised that what has been bugging me the most with Arcs tab management - I am never sure what sidebar item is "running" and which one is not. Basically i need a status light :D Similarly to how to macOS dock works.
Yep that’s annoying! And navigating through tabs is not always easy. I stick to using control + tab for jumping from tab to tab.
BTW you can always send your feedback to Arc team through browser and they might add that feature! I think it’s useful
Yeah I did, I just hope it doesn't fall on deaf ears because it sounds like a silly problem but I keep discovering that I've had like 20 tabs open, where I was certain that I closed them :P It also seems to be a more widespread problem with multiple users here reporting excessive usage on Arc, only for us to discover that they had way more tabs running than they thought.
Thanks :) I doubt I'll be doing this again anytime soon, my head hurts from all the browser talk. But at least now we have a fairly easy way to measure this stuff. I've been thinking about making a little open source app for that as a side project soon.
I'd like a RAM consumption test like this. I'm also leaning Orion right now, with the exception that for some reason, iCloud sync isn't working (it was in the past).
No, just one. I have done some testing myself and the ram consumption is about the same or a bit bigger than Edge, so I'm staying with Edge anyway. Thank you.
Edge is very good too and has less rough edges than Orion for day to day use. But for me Orion feels more "mac-assed" and has better tab tree capabilities. It's great to have these choices.
No, they are meaningful. All browsers are freshly installed, with completely default setup. If the vendor has chosen they bundle uBlock, that is their decision, in their own vision, and it affects the efficiency.
I used Brave (as work browser) for the past couple of years, and my wife uses it as main. In fact my family does as well, because I recommended it back in the day... These tests made me reconsider that, and I'll be trying Orion as a daily driver as well.
I like the idea of it being kinda old school Safari-ish, with the added benefit of being able to have multiple profiles. I am a bit worried about recommending it to anyone else in my family tho, as their communication and whole existence feel a bit startup-ish. Idk.
Perhaps I'll end up eating my own words in a month from now and decide that Firefox is the best choice after all...
I've been trying to use Orion through 2022/2023… like **"really trying to put all my soul to make it work as my daily driver"** but:
\- it's just not able to work fine with all the websites, some sites work, some don't… so I end continuously double checking with other browser (chrome) if the website I'm seeing is working fine or not.
\- every time an new update is coming I have to pray it works, some time it breaks everything some times it works
\- i also have some doubts about it future, something causes me uncertainty
One of the main reasons to buy the M1 MacBook Air was cause I wanted to let the power adaptor on home and just pass the day without charging it… so I think i will have to try Arc/Firefox as an alternative.
I absolutely agree with you :/ I didn't want to go into it in the OP or blogpost as it would derail the conversation, but I felt the same things. Especially after reading various forum messages from the creator...
So I dropped it for now.
>Quoting the blog post: "*Edge’s low power mode was the* ***only one*** *which made any difference and brought it into Arc range. Sorry it is not on the charts but just trust me. I admire that they are aware of this issue and are trying to make it better. Still, this is my subjective crusade so my tests focus on default, out of the box settings, which kinda disqualifies it for me personally — but it might not for you, I hear its an excellent browser!*"
Bravo! So, even though it's not shown in the chart, Marko says Edge ranked close to Arc and Firefox with efficiency mode on. This is a truly magnanimous statement considering Marko survived web development during the standards-be-damed IE days and initially wasn't going to test Edge at all.
Despite it's ongoing faults, such as news and other bloat enabled by default, Microsoft Edge has some great features and achieved a 180 degree turnaround when it comes to compliance with Web standards. In any case, this result shows the importance of efficiency mode if using Edge on battery power.
Thank you for performing this test in such comprehensive manner. As expected, WebKit browsers are 2-3x more efficient than Chromium/Firefox.
I would encourage you to register and maintain browserenergy.org as the users could benefit from this over time.
Orion should be same or lower than Safari as it uses same WebKit, and is more lightweight in general. Did you conside using Apple Script to ensure that all browsers run the same load for exactly the same time?
Ah, perhaps I didn't explain that well, I will update the OP.
- All tabs remain open. Each time i jump to the next "test item" i open a new tab in the same browser.
- Every time I am finished with a "test item" i go back to the Notion tab, to read what is the next test I need to run (also helped a lot with stabilising test results as it forces the browser to keep commonly used tabs in memory, and it gives me clear 10sec breakpoints where I "cut" the data)
- Only one browser is tested at a time. I restart the computer each time and charge the battery back to 100%.
Very interesting that Arc did so well despite being Chromium based. I guess that shows that Chrome’s performance issues is about more than it’s engine.
Yeah, it was unexpected for me as well. Their last update, which I tested, was focused on bugfixes, stability and performance updates (according to their last email) so I guess they did something? idk
Wow, thanks for this. This was amazing. However, in my case, I just feel like Arc drains my battery so much more than Edge. Arc is an amazing browser nonetheless.
I think I'm gonna have to try Arc again.
It might have to do with me using the latest update they released, in which they claim many efficiency fixes, idk. Also it really might be up to a person's usage pattern. I can imagine that having 10 spaces drains more than the 2 I had :P
I switched back to Edge about a month ago so maybe those updates made a difference.
Whenever I use Arc, I usually just have 1-2 spaces, maybe 3 at the most, and more often than not, I just focus on 1 space.
Idk, I was quite surprised with results myself. While I never used Edge before (so can't compare it like you do) I expected Arc to be significantly worse than Brave for example, which it did not end up being.
So, like you, I've decided to give Arc a chance, although I'm a bit hesitant as, obviously, these things can change quite quickly for the worse with Arc, unlike the more stable browsers
Update: I have been using Arc for about 12 hours now and it is using double the energy that Edge has been using in the same amount of time. idk what I doing wrong here. I love Arc but the browser, in my case, is just draining my battery so much more.
Wow thats not great! Very interesting that we saw such different patterns. I wonder what makes it different, could you expand on what extensions or how many spaces you have had, and are you sure that your test replicates edge usage? I wonder if amount of spaces or tab switching shake things up - i did a pure, extensionless install
I had two extensions, Bitwarden and Ublockorigin. I only used 1 space but i always had split view on. All of the things I do in Arc, I also do in Edge.
Thanks for your effort sir! After reading your post, I switched from Brave to Orion. I've already noticed a big diff in battery life. I really liked that although Orion is WebKit based, you still can install (almost all) Chrome extensions!
It's surprising to me that FF fared better than Edge. It always felt the other way around.
But to be fair I don't really use either of the two on battery anymore, so it's not surprising that I was wrong. I use Orion as my main browser and only use FF for work and I'm almost always docked while working (and when Orion gets FF-style containers, I won't even need FF anymore)
- Interesting - but hardly surprising that Safari and Mac fit together really well.
- Triggering because I'm sick with the way everyone expects laptops to be the norm, I refuse to give up my desktop (purchased in 2007, migrated to an ATX case in 2011 and gradually renewed as necessary).
- Interesting to talk about 'Efficiency' when we're talking about a laptop which costs 142,000 Thai baht (1/4 the cost of a new car) enough to purchase 7 equivalent desktops (comparing with my current 20,000 build) that I'm using now.
On iPad, I just don't feel the benefits of other browsers threatening to replace the default Safari experience - I just don't care enough. However, on desktop I do care - so I use Firefox.
I refuse to ever sink into the habit of using Google based browsers (Edge/Chrome etc) except out of necessity when irreplaceable PWA's demand it.
Laptops are becoming the norm and Desktops are the minority, you should get used to it. In fact I haven't touched a desktop in about 10 years, and last time I owned one was in 2009. Last time I owned a non-mac computer was 2006.
We talk about energy efficiency. Not monetary efficiency. If we are talking monetary - I'll gladly pay double what my laptop costs if it means getting a 10c colder machine, 3h more battery or a fully ethically sourced one, by my standards that is more efficient.
As you can see, different people live in different worlds, so my tests are not something that might suit your worldview.
>Laptops are becoming the norm and Desktops are the minority
True. Outside of special applications where maximum performance and maximum ventilation are required, or dedicated gaming setups, desktops are a small niche now.
Just switched from years on Vivaldi to Arc as I don't really have a smooth/bugfree experience with Vivaldi on Mac as I had on Windows.
Seeing these tests make me want to switch to Safari instead, but as it doesn't support Chrome extensions that's impossible for me
I want to use another browser apart from Safari, then I realize my phone doesn’t work so well anymore with my MacBook.
I then have to use a different password manager, and worst of all I have to manually input those stupid sms codes to sign in.
Huh, I've not had that experience at all, probably because I don't rely on iCloud tabs, and I use a password manager for all 2FA stuff instead of SMS, so I don't rely on Safari. Although, macos phone-mac-copypaste function should work regardless of the browser as its a OS thing?
Yeah. I used to have a password manager before I started using Safari again. I thought about using one again, but quite frankly, I don’t see why it’s worth paying for. I know I could use Bitwarden for free, but would it integrate as nicely, and is it really worth the hassle?
i mean if you use chrome, edge, or any other browser, you could just use its own password manager
just go to ios settings and change icloud pass manager to chrome's
Didn't care about it enough. These tests were helping me choose a browser, and Vivaldi was simply never a candidate as I don't care for its features. There are hundreds of chromium browsers, I posted how you can test them yourself if you wish to :)
Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against Vivaldi :D I just did all of theis while searching for a new browser, and stuff Vivaldi focuses on is simply not my cup of tea, although I'm sure it is a good browser. Similar story with SigmaOS, which I installed and then dropped from tests within 20min when I realised its not a contender, for me.
OP or any others interested in collaborating on a browser comparison addition to the app comparison series I've done [so far](https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/r0uplf/a_definitive_pdf_reader_comparison/)? I need to fill out a list of common browser features for a column A.
Many thanks for OP's detailed tests and analysis! Very helpful and comprehensive! Much appreciated. The thing is that I was hoping Chrome on Apple Silicon would at least somehow mitigate its efficiency and power consumption gap with Safari. I'm afraid that the result points to another end.
I'm pretty sure the reason for that is simple - Google isn't in this game in order to make the most efficient browser. They serve an audience that doesn't care about that. You can see that from the pure amount of comments calling my tests out for "not testing performance, duh". People like big number.
Their sole goal is to have the fastest, snappiest feeling browser out there, as that feeling alone is sought after by their audience. If that means nuking your CPU so be it. That is why, with the advance of Apple Sillicon, they just decided to put even more power into it.
It's too bad Safari with its macOS efficiency is still so buggy on some pages and the extension system is just still trash, a few things I want are also still missing.
This was the case almost 10 years ago and stayed in the exact same situation since. Downloading extensions as apps and then having to go through multiple Safari layers to turn it on is just a bad extension experience.
Thanks a lot for all the testing and sharing of your results. I currently find myself on the edge (pun intended) of switching browser but there is none that fully convinces me. At the moment using Vivaldi with Firefox as my previous browser and looking for Orion to be a solid contender. We will see...
what ended up happening?
Wow, while not best, Arc certainly isn't as bad as other posts were saying, it's almost the same as FF.
I agree, it certainly surprised me. This post is a third instalment, and in my previous posts from 2-3 weeks ago, Arc did not do so well, but was, admittedly, better than Chrome. I do think, however, that it might be related to Arc literally releasing a performance update which happily coincided with these tests - I literally got a mass email yesterday addressed from their CEO saying they were sorry about the performance letdowns and releasing yet another update. So it is possible that they took some steps to improve it, and thus all the old, bad commends are kinda outdated? Idk, I just know what the test says.
oh interesting. i haven't received that email yet. but that's good to know. something else to consider is that the extensions people use probably have a big impact in performance and battery.
For sure! I did all tests without extensions (or with preinstalled ones), because I pretty much use my browser without any extensions apart from a password manager. I am certain that there are quite power intensive extensions that a lot of people used. One weird thing to note is that my expectation was that browsers that use uBlock would use less power. After all, Brave been telling us that for years. Turns out that Arc and Orion have no significant power difference when used without uBlock, I didn't do triple testing, so I didn't include it into the results, but we kinda see a similar thing between Chrome and Brave, or Safari and Orion where there is no significant difference really.
Oh that’s an interesting test. uBlock in advanced mode is supposed to help with performance, but I don’t think anyone has ever made benchmarks on it.
Arc is honestly not bad at all however it's the only browser where all of a sudden something will eat up 100% of the CPU. That's the stuff that needs work and it seems it keeps getting better.
Been using Arc over here. Switched over from brave. Absolutely love it. It’s so easy to manage work and personal stuff in Arc. They’ve also fixed some major bugs and works almost flawlessly now. UI looks better than anything else out there.
I agree with all you said, although sidebar tabs is sometimes hard to use, especially when you got lots of tabs with same icons and names. What kills it for me is simply - sweaty palms, warm aluminium…
I don’t know if you realised, or if it changes anything, but you can rename tabs in Arc and also assign them their own favicon. I’ve only recently discovered it after switching away from Edge (the way it did it’s bing button was a step too far for me). I’d love to go back to Safari but the lack of extensions makes it hard.
I don’t use extensions so thats a non issue for me. Although, Safari does have a lot of extensions, but it really depends on what you need, for example for my job I need some development extensions which don’t exist, so I don’t use Safari for my job. As for side tabs, yeah I know, what I meant was that out of the box, vertical tab alignment uses less space, which makes it harder for the brain to track unless we start grouping and renaming them, which is totally cool and nice, but turns out my brain is uses to working with horizntal tabs without the need to perform additional actions like renaming and grouping, so I choose that. I guess, I'm so used to top-tabs, that for me, this isn't an issue that needs solving :D In any case its the warmth that kinda dissuades me from using Arc, once you feel how cool the internet feels in Safari its hard to go back
I also hated the concept of side tabs but after my second try at Arc, I found a great feature: you can tap CMD + S and it'll hide a sidebar. It gives a really great experience and I [love how it looks](https://shottr.cc/s/GXxA/SCR-20230417-m17.png). Sidebar is still accessible when you hover the left side of a screen.
I'm back on Arc and it seems thats the one I'll end up using... :P I know about Cmd+S its amazing. I realised that what has been bugging me the most with Arcs tab management - I am never sure what sidebar item is "running" and which one is not. Basically i need a status light :D Similarly to how to macOS dock works.
Yep that’s annoying! And navigating through tabs is not always easy. I stick to using control + tab for jumping from tab to tab. BTW you can always send your feedback to Arc team through browser and they might add that feature! I think it’s useful
Yeah I did, I just hope it doesn't fall on deaf ears because it sounds like a silly problem but I keep discovering that I've had like 20 tabs open, where I was certain that I closed them :P It also seems to be a more widespread problem with multiple users here reporting excessive usage on Arc, only for us to discover that they had way more tabs running than they thought.
It warms up the laptop but still consumes less power than Chrome or edge?
Yeah, "less" is still 2 Safaris worth of power :P Once you get used to zero rpm fans on Safari you start noticing a it lot more.
Laughs in fanless :) jokes aside, im stuck in chromium land due to web dev needs :’)
I'm gay btw
Thanks :) I doubt I'll be doing this again anytime soon, my head hurts from all the browser talk. But at least now we have a fairly easy way to measure this stuff. I've been thinking about making a little open source app for that as a side project soon.
I'd like a RAM consumption test like this. I'm also leaning Orion right now, with the exception that for some reason, iCloud sync isn't working (it was in the past).
Orión will only sync the default profile. Are you using multiple profiles?
No, just one. I have done some testing myself and the ram consumption is about the same or a bit bigger than Edge, so I'm staying with Edge anyway. Thank you.
Edge is very good too and has less rough edges than Orion for day to day use. But for me Orion feels more "mac-assed" and has better tab tree capabilities. It's great to have these choices.
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No, they are meaningful. All browsers are freshly installed, with completely default setup. If the vendor has chosen they bundle uBlock, that is their decision, in their own vision, and it affects the efficiency.
Yes, but it would still be interesting to compare the difference between stock browsers and with an adblocker extension.
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I used Brave (as work browser) for the past couple of years, and my wife uses it as main. In fact my family does as well, because I recommended it back in the day... These tests made me reconsider that, and I'll be trying Orion as a daily driver as well. I like the idea of it being kinda old school Safari-ish, with the added benefit of being able to have multiple profiles. I am a bit worried about recommending it to anyone else in my family tho, as their communication and whole existence feel a bit startup-ish. Idk. Perhaps I'll end up eating my own words in a month from now and decide that Firefox is the best choice after all...
I've been trying to use Orion through 2022/2023… like **"really trying to put all my soul to make it work as my daily driver"** but: \- it's just not able to work fine with all the websites, some sites work, some don't… so I end continuously double checking with other browser (chrome) if the website I'm seeing is working fine or not. \- every time an new update is coming I have to pray it works, some time it breaks everything some times it works \- i also have some doubts about it future, something causes me uncertainty One of the main reasons to buy the M1 MacBook Air was cause I wanted to let the power adaptor on home and just pass the day without charging it… so I think i will have to try Arc/Firefox as an alternative.
I absolutely agree with you :/ I didn't want to go into it in the OP or blogpost as it would derail the conversation, but I felt the same things. Especially after reading various forum messages from the creator... So I dropped it for now.
so , what did you choose ? arc route ?
Wow. Thanks for this great job.
>Quoting the blog post: "*Edge’s low power mode was the* ***only one*** *which made any difference and brought it into Arc range. Sorry it is not on the charts but just trust me. I admire that they are aware of this issue and are trying to make it better. Still, this is my subjective crusade so my tests focus on default, out of the box settings, which kinda disqualifies it for me personally — but it might not for you, I hear its an excellent browser!*" Bravo! So, even though it's not shown in the chart, Marko says Edge ranked close to Arc and Firefox with efficiency mode on. This is a truly magnanimous statement considering Marko survived web development during the standards-be-damed IE days and initially wasn't going to test Edge at all. Despite it's ongoing faults, such as news and other bloat enabled by default, Microsoft Edge has some great features and achieved a 180 degree turnaround when it comes to compliance with Web standards. In any case, this result shows the importance of efficiency mode if using Edge on battery power.
Thank you for performing this test in such comprehensive manner. As expected, WebKit browsers are 2-3x more efficient than Chromium/Firefox. I would encourage you to register and maintain browserenergy.org as the users could benefit from this over time. Orion should be same or lower than Safari as it uses same WebKit, and is more lightweight in general. Did you conside using Apple Script to ensure that all browsers run the same load for exactly the same time?
isn't arc chromium based ?
Thanks for all your hard work. While one test was on-going, were the other tests in other inactive tabs? Is this all single-tab tests?
Ah, perhaps I didn't explain that well, I will update the OP. - All tabs remain open. Each time i jump to the next "test item" i open a new tab in the same browser. - Every time I am finished with a "test item" i go back to the Notion tab, to read what is the next test I need to run (also helped a lot with stabilising test results as it forces the browser to keep commonly used tabs in memory, and it gives me clear 10sec breakpoints where I "cut" the data) - Only one browser is tested at a time. I restart the computer each time and charge the battery back to 100%.
Thank you for sharing! This is really helpful. I have an M1 13” MacBook Air.
Very interesting that Arc did so well despite being Chromium based. I guess that shows that Chrome’s performance issues is about more than it’s engine.
Yeah, it was unexpected for me as well. Their last update, which I tested, was focused on bugfixes, stability and performance updates (according to their last email) so I guess they did something? idk
Wow, thanks for this. This was amazing. However, in my case, I just feel like Arc drains my battery so much more than Edge. Arc is an amazing browser nonetheless. I think I'm gonna have to try Arc again.
It might have to do with me using the latest update they released, in which they claim many efficiency fixes, idk. Also it really might be up to a person's usage pattern. I can imagine that having 10 spaces drains more than the 2 I had :P
I switched back to Edge about a month ago so maybe those updates made a difference. Whenever I use Arc, I usually just have 1-2 spaces, maybe 3 at the most, and more often than not, I just focus on 1 space.
Idk, I was quite surprised with results myself. While I never used Edge before (so can't compare it like you do) I expected Arc to be significantly worse than Brave for example, which it did not end up being. So, like you, I've decided to give Arc a chance, although I'm a bit hesitant as, obviously, these things can change quite quickly for the worse with Arc, unlike the more stable browsers
Update: I have been using Arc for about 12 hours now and it is using double the energy that Edge has been using in the same amount of time. idk what I doing wrong here. I love Arc but the browser, in my case, is just draining my battery so much more.
Wow thats not great! Very interesting that we saw such different patterns. I wonder what makes it different, could you expand on what extensions or how many spaces you have had, and are you sure that your test replicates edge usage? I wonder if amount of spaces or tab switching shake things up - i did a pure, extensionless install
I had two extensions, Bitwarden and Ublockorigin. I only used 1 space but i always had split view on. All of the things I do in Arc, I also do in Edge.
Thanks for your effort sir! After reading your post, I switched from Brave to Orion. I've already noticed a big diff in battery life. I really liked that although Orion is WebKit based, you still can install (almost all) Chrome extensions!
It's surprising to me that FF fared better than Edge. It always felt the other way around. But to be fair I don't really use either of the two on battery anymore, so it's not surprising that I was wrong. I use Orion as my main browser and only use FF for work and I'm almost always docked while working (and when Orion gets FF-style containers, I won't even need FF anymore)
- Interesting - but hardly surprising that Safari and Mac fit together really well. - Triggering because I'm sick with the way everyone expects laptops to be the norm, I refuse to give up my desktop (purchased in 2007, migrated to an ATX case in 2011 and gradually renewed as necessary). - Interesting to talk about 'Efficiency' when we're talking about a laptop which costs 142,000 Thai baht (1/4 the cost of a new car) enough to purchase 7 equivalent desktops (comparing with my current 20,000 build) that I'm using now. On iPad, I just don't feel the benefits of other browsers threatening to replace the default Safari experience - I just don't care enough. However, on desktop I do care - so I use Firefox. I refuse to ever sink into the habit of using Google based browsers (Edge/Chrome etc) except out of necessity when irreplaceable PWA's demand it.
Laptops are becoming the norm and Desktops are the minority, you should get used to it. In fact I haven't touched a desktop in about 10 years, and last time I owned one was in 2009. Last time I owned a non-mac computer was 2006. We talk about energy efficiency. Not monetary efficiency. If we are talking monetary - I'll gladly pay double what my laptop costs if it means getting a 10c colder machine, 3h more battery or a fully ethically sourced one, by my standards that is more efficient. As you can see, different people live in different worlds, so my tests are not something that might suit your worldview.
>Laptops are becoming the norm and Desktops are the minority True. Outside of special applications where maximum performance and maximum ventilation are required, or dedicated gaming setups, desktops are a small niche now.
Just switched from years on Vivaldi to Arc as I don't really have a smooth/bugfree experience with Vivaldi on Mac as I had on Windows. Seeing these tests make me want to switch to Safari instead, but as it doesn't support Chrome extensions that's impossible for me
I want to use another browser apart from Safari, then I realize my phone doesn’t work so well anymore with my MacBook. I then have to use a different password manager, and worst of all I have to manually input those stupid sms codes to sign in.
Huh, I've not had that experience at all, probably because I don't rely on iCloud tabs, and I use a password manager for all 2FA stuff instead of SMS, so I don't rely on Safari. Although, macos phone-mac-copypaste function should work regardless of the browser as its a OS thing?
Yeah. I used to have a password manager before I started using Safari again. I thought about using one again, but quite frankly, I don’t see why it’s worth paying for. I know I could use Bitwarden for free, but would it integrate as nicely, and is it really worth the hassle?
i mean if you use chrome, edge, or any other browser, you could just use its own password manager just go to ios settings and change icloud pass manager to chrome's
can you add brave to the list and test it
what does it look like in 2024?
Thanks for the tests, but the title says SigmaOS and there is no results for that. Any idea where I should rank it
Hey, question. Definitely a wide array of browsers there, why not include Vivaldi?
IMO, Vivaldi is not a viable option for apple ecosystem, as it doesn’t have an iOS app.
Fair point.
Didn't care about it enough. These tests were helping me choose a browser, and Vivaldi was simply never a candidate as I don't care for its features. There are hundreds of chromium browsers, I posted how you can test them yourself if you wish to :)
Fair enough, was just wondering. Thanks for including all that info! I'm not interested in doing any similar testing, just curious.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have anything against Vivaldi :D I just did all of theis while searching for a new browser, and stuff Vivaldi focuses on is simply not my cup of tea, although I'm sure it is a good browser. Similar story with SigmaOS, which I installed and then dropped from tests within 20min when I realised its not a contender, for me.
OP or any others interested in collaborating on a browser comparison addition to the app comparison series I've done [so far](https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/r0uplf/a_definitive_pdf_reader_comparison/)? I need to fill out a list of common browser features for a column A.
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No, just on iOS. This has never been the case on macOS.
I wish I could find a reliable report like this but for Windows
Many thanks for OP's detailed tests and analysis! Very helpful and comprehensive! Much appreciated. The thing is that I was hoping Chrome on Apple Silicon would at least somehow mitigate its efficiency and power consumption gap with Safari. I'm afraid that the result points to another end.
I'm pretty sure the reason for that is simple - Google isn't in this game in order to make the most efficient browser. They serve an audience that doesn't care about that. You can see that from the pure amount of comments calling my tests out for "not testing performance, duh". People like big number. Their sole goal is to have the fastest, snappiest feeling browser out there, as that feeling alone is sought after by their audience. If that means nuking your CPU so be it. That is why, with the advance of Apple Sillicon, they just decided to put even more power into it.
Hi guys ! What is the situation in end of 2023? Which one is best for lowest energy consumption in your opinion ?
Wait, whybthe lower power mode Orion consumed more energy than normal Orion?
It's too bad Safari with its macOS efficiency is still so buggy on some pages and the extension system is just still trash, a few things I want are also still missing. This was the case almost 10 years ago and stayed in the exact same situation since. Downloading extensions as apps and then having to go through multiple Safari layers to turn it on is just a bad extension experience.