Using Google Chrome Absolutely Kills the Battery Life of the New MacBook Pro

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Posted April 10, 2015 at 7:21pm by iClarified

If you use Google Chrome on your MacBook while on the go, you may want to reconsider that.

Users have long complained that Chrome eats their battery much faster than rival browsers. The Verge decided to test just how much using Apple's new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro. The results are staggering.

I ran the usual Verge battery test on Apple’s new machine. With the screen set to 65 percent brightness, it cycles through a series of websites until the laptop’s battery gives out. The native Safari made the new Retina machine look good: 13 hours and 18 minutes. Google’s Chrome, on the other hand, forced the laptop to tap out at 9 hours and 45 minutes.

That's a shocking 3 hour and 33 minute reduction in battery life. In addition, the site notes that the speed of the browser is also significantly worse. The SunSpider browser benchmark clocks the MacBook Pro in at 203ms when using Chrome. Safari scores 30% better at 144ms using the same machine. Even when trying to play content from YouTube, Chrome struggles. For example, Chrome is unable to play 4K 60fps YouTube video on the MacBook but the video can be played back using Safari.

While this may not be an issue for those plugged in, if you are traveling or need to conserve battery life. Consider using Safari, it gives you 36% more browsing time.

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Using Google Chrome Absolutely Kills the Battery Life of the New MacBook Pro

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blondie9x - April 12, 2015 at 4:00pm

Just for comparison purposes would you mind running the test against Firefox also? Would like to see how Firefox compares against Chrome and Safari. Would really appreciate the test and results. Thanks.

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Tech Jedi - April 11, 2015 at 4:02pm

I was wondering why my 2010 MacBook Pro battery life went to crap. Thanks for letting me know.

poiuy - April 11, 2015 at 12:09am

I only hope people will realize how Super BLoated Chrome's Blink engine is using both CPU/RAM wise that litellary shoots too 100% CPU/ eats half of your total ram eg. 8GB of your 16GB just starting it up much worse when your browsing/loading pages..... Better use Safari(webkit)/Firefox(gecko) instead w/c is more stable..... Any other Chrome Fork browser, eg. Opera/SRW iron/ Comodo/etc suffers from this due to them using same Google's Flawed Blink engine....

matrixmaniac - April 10, 2015 at 11:23pm

Chrome consumes ridiculous amounts of resources anywhere... Why would anyone use this crap anyway? Who really wants to be tracked at every step and every action he or she takes on the internet? And who really wants to depend on internet and (google)-cloud based services at all times?

SimonSays - April 10, 2015 at 9:54pm

Why would anyone want to use chrome anyway? Safari is problem free and lightweight. You deserve everything you get when you knowingly use google products. They use everything you do for advertising purposes. I am 100% Google free.

gamerscul9870 - April 10, 2015 at 10:18pm

Couldn't be any happier. I am beyond a in love with safari. I always get instant load times and extensions made for it all without extra viruses.

Diego Vilar - April 11, 2015 at 1:27pm

Doesn't help that Apple stopped releasing Safari for Windows. Makes it impossible to me the standard Browser expect on Apple devices. It's really shame, and a really strange attitude.

Diego Vilar - April 11, 2015 at 1:29pm

Damn spell auto-corrector :P "be" and "except" and "a shame"

gamerscul9870 - April 11, 2015 at 1:33pm

It's because people stopped with windows or almost all of them thanks to metro-like tiles. This really made it go downhill and made me stay on Xperia and 7. Those let alone bsod never screwed up.

Mr Logical - April 10, 2015 at 8:26pm

This I did not know. Thank you.

GustavO0 - April 10, 2015 at 7:57pm

Yeah this happens on my 2014 air. It's not just the new Mac.

NoGoodNick - April 10, 2015 at 7:56pm

Memory hog. I think I'll wait until Google gets its act together. They're quick to dump untested beta software on us (for US to test), but not very good at cleaning up their own cludgy code.

justabrake - April 10, 2015 at 7:27pm

Try Canary Chrome Beta !