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by kitsunesoba 1293 days ago
With more than a handful of instances, Chrome and Chrome-based apps (Electron/CEF) will eat into battery life to a degree I've not seen of too many other things. I can spend all day working in heavy IDEs like Android Studio and Xcode, doing frequent incremental compiles and still get better battery life than I would with a heavy Chromium tab/app load.

Teams specifically is horrendously badly engineered on top of being an Electron app. Technically speaking it's like the polar opposite of VS Code despite being made by the same company.
1 comments
sofixa 1292 days ago
Teams is a shitshow, that we can all agree on. It doesn't work properly on any platform.

However, Chrome is the most popular browser by far. Does that mean that all the people bragging about their MBP's 10+ hour battery lifes aren't doing what probably the majority of users are (browse the web in a Chromium-based browser), and thus their anecdata isn't a representative sample?

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kitsunesoba 1292 days ago
It has more to do with the quantity of Chrome instances (tabs or electron apps) than it does with them running Chrome at all. A small number of tabs or 1-2 well behaved Electron apps will still have a sizable negative impact but it won’t chew through battery life like a heavy tab load or stacks of Electron apps will. The type of sites loaded in the tabs make a difference too; tabs with static documentation aren’t going to make the kind of impact a tabs with heavy web apps. Lots of variables.

That said, it’s not that uncommon for Mac users conscious about battery life to be using Safari where they can instead of Chrome, keeping Chrome instances down to a minimum. From what I’ve seen in discussions across the web, battery friendliness is one of the most cited if not the most cited reason why people use Safari.

I wish Google would pause feature development for a while and focus on efficiency, because that’s easily where Chrome is weakest, but that’s never going to happen so long as it’s the dominant browser. It makes Google more money to instead develop whatever they think will push more people towards Google services.

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