Why you’re stupid if you don’t use Safari on your MacBook

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The results are in: you're stupid if you don't switch to Safari on your MacBook.
The results are in: you're stupid if you don't switch to Safari on your MacBook.
Photo: BatteryBox

We’ve seen before that changing from Chrome to Safari can make a big difference on your Mac’s battery life.

But if you haven’t switched from Chrome or Firefox to Safari yet, this fact might change your mind: If you’re a MacBook user, you’re losing an average of one hour of total battery life by using anything but Safari.

The battery experts at BatteryBox ran Chrome, Safari and Firefox through a series of tests to determine which browser was most battery-efficient:

We measured the power consumption of watching videos on YouTube, browsing Reddit, streaming on Netflix vs Putlocker, creeping on Twitter and FaceBook, composing emails on services like Gmail and Hotmail, and searching for stuff on Google, Bing (yup, surprisingly, it’s still used), and DuckDuckGo. We used a factory-restored MacBook Pro Retina 13” to test each website on one internet browser at a time. No programs other than the browser were open.

If you’ve read this far, you already know how the test ended up:

Averaging data from all websites tested, Safari won first place with 6hours 21min of total usage, Firefox second with 5hours 29min of usage, and Chrome last with 5hours 8min of usage.

Basically, if you simply switch to using Safari instead of Chrome, on average you could get an extra 1 hour of usage from your battery life.

As Apple pundit John Gruber notes:

This exemplifies what the “Safari Is the New IE” crowd doesn’t get — Apple’s priorities for Safari/WebKit are very different from Google’s for Chrome/Blink. Innovation and progress aren’t necessarily only about adding new features. 24 percent better battery life is huge.

What he means is that, for Safari, Apple’s priorities are as simple as making sure the browser runs as well on a Mac as possible. That’s why new versions of Safari for El Capitan contain the Content Blocker feature, which strips away Javascript and other advertising elements that cause long load times and huge battery drains.

With Chrome, though, Google wants its browser to be optimized to display ads, because Google runs an ad business. And Firefox also makes much of its money through search partnerships and ads.

In short? Switch to Safari if you have a MacBook. Your battery, and your web experience, will thank you for it.

Source: BatteryBox

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