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Comment by pwthornton | Hacker News Reader

The reviews I saw said that using Chrome gets good better life, but if you want great battery life you need to use something like Safari.

I switched to Safari a few years ago, and I couldn't be happier. Chrome's performance and battery life are atrocious. I only use Chrome when I need something specific from it.

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I saw that comment in a couple different places. Presumably Chrome is running through Rosetta 2, whereas Safari is native to the M1. I imagine once Chrome is available natively, performance will be somewhat better, though probably still not as good as Safari.

IIRC Chrome is a battery hog / memory hog on all platforms.

Am I wrong in this regard?

Afaik it's a memory hog but it doesn't really use more or less battery then other browsers.

so it uses more memory but not more battery?

That's...not a contradiction?

On the new machines yes, but none if the people you read about before today had AS machines, they were all comparing Chrome and Safari on Intel, so it’s unlikely that stays quiet will change once Chrone is native on AS.

I was referring to multiple reviews of new Apple hardware, just to clarify.

Actually, I think it will. The M1 chip takes a lot smaller proportion of power of the laptop to run (compared to say, the LCD, ssd, etc). If the new macbook air idles at 6W and runs chrome at 10W with no fan, people are barely gonna notice. That’s a big difference compared to an intel machine running chrome at 35+ watts.

Google today published Chrome 87 with (supposedly) big memory and CPU usage improvements: https://9to5google.com/2020/11/17/chrome-87-mac-windows-stab...

Also they started rolling out the first M1 optimized version of Chrome (but has been pulled since due to stability issues): https://9to5google.com/2020/11/17/chrome-mac-apple-silicon/

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