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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

For my use case, it's quite obvious what's draining the battery: addons. Every trick and feature meant to preserve privacy and to remove visual trash will significantly impact load times, responsiveness, and battery life.

It's all worth it to me, but there's no doubt a web without tracking and ads would easily double my battery life.

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It seems obvious to me that uBlock Origin uses less battery than an autoplaying video in the corner of every website you visit. So on balance I don't think it's fair to say the addons are the cause.

With hardware video decoding, video playback is actually remarkably power efficient.

That said, it's been ages since I've last seen an autoplaying video. I only seem to encounter them on American news websites for some reason.

While there will be extensions which increase power consumption the opposite is true for the most used category, that being content blockers. A well-tuned uBlock Origin will cut down radically on the number of requests performed per page, the amount of CPU time wasted on non-essential Javascript, the amount of GPU render time wasted on presenting those horrid moving monstrosities called ads and the amount of energy wasted by the user while he waits for the damn page to stop loading.

Never, ever venture out on the web without a content blocker.

Those extensions usually improve performance, no?

When browsing a site full of JS-heavy ads, sure.

When running a browser performance benchmark, generally not - the ad block extension adds an overhead to the page. I saw this when experimenting with Orion Browser on Mac, which uses the Webkit engine, but adds support for many Firefox and Chrome web extension APIs.

In experimenting with that, I noticed that enabling extensions and using many extensions during benchmarks could easily impact on scores. Even just an ad blocker like uBO had a measurable impact on a benchmark, from my recollection.

Orion is using a web engine that was never really designed to support what they are trying to make it do. Obviously it's just code in the end but a lot of the changes will be made for convenience rather than in ways that make sense if you look at WebKit holistically, because the team is just too small to actually do that. So it is natural that performance suffers.

Depends on what sites you visit, but hooking every single HTTP call and HTML DOM isn't cheap. I often find websites with ads to be just as fast as websites without them, just more cluttered, unusable, and more of a privacy nightmare. The uBO overhead does seem to impact CPU usage, though.

I'll gladly pay the 15 minutes of battery power spent on filtering out that trash.

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