When away from a power socket, I use Safari instead of Chrome. Saves battery a LOT. Was able to run 11" Air with 19 tabs on Safari and with vim (on iTerm). 2hrs later still had 95% battery left.
> When away from a power socket, I use Safari instead of Chrome. Saves battery a LOT.
Were you comparing Safari with 0 extensions vs. Chrome with 0 extensions? Or does each have a different extension load?
I will often fall back to Safari if a page doesn't render properly in Chrome, but that's because I installed a bunch of extensions on Chrome and have consciously left Safari pure as the driven snow. It's a different problem domain, but I know certain extensions can use resources in surprising ways.
It's not just that. I see nearly 2x better battery life using Safari over Chrome on a 15" rMBP, and I have plugins turned off (click to play). It just uses a lot less CPU, full stop. I don't know what the real difference is, but I suspect Safari just does a better job of idling than Chrome does.
My semi-verified guess is that a lot of the difference is CPU usage when two-finger scrolling on large pages. I just tried it on this page with OSX 10.9 and a 15" Mac Pro, monitoring with Activity Monitor and Coconut Battery while bouncing rapidly up and down.
Chrome burns 90% of a CPU on one thread, and another 40% on another. Coconut reports about 32 Watts used. Safari maxes at about 12% plus 8%, and tops at about 15 Watts. Base usage on this machine with the current screen brightness and applications that happen to be open is 10-12 Watts. I get approximately the same results with Incognito mode, which suggests the problem is core Chrome rather than add-ons.
When you click the battery dropdown on the top right, Chrome is consistently listed as an "Apps Using Significant Energy". On previous releases of OS X I also noticed that by default it would use my dedicated GPU at all times, whereas Safari would not (not sure if this is still true).
Were you comparing Safari with 0 extensions vs. Chrome with 0 extensions? Or does each have a different extension load?
I will often fall back to Safari if a page doesn't render properly in Chrome, but that's because I installed a bunch of extensions on Chrome and have consciously left Safari pure as the driven snow. It's a different problem domain, but I know certain extensions can use resources in surprising ways.