No matter how much third-party browsers for Mac brag about browsing speeds, features or anything else for that matter, Safari pretty much ahead in line when it comes down to sheer conservation of battery life. No other browser, currently available for the Mac, can probably match Safari in this respect. But that is probably about to change now.
Google has today announced a slew of new features into its Chrome for Mac browser. We surely had an update, a few days ago, which stopped the unnecessary rendering of flash ads and other useless flash content which could significantly burn down a lot of stored power on your Mac, but the search giant now aims to make a few more subtle but effective changes in how the browser works, to help preserve your portable power.
The new changes will help Chrome match or at least approach the CPU frequency at which Safari executes its work.
Currently, the priority for rendering and caching a background tab on Chrome is the same as for a foreground tab. The team believes that by reducing the priorities to background tabs will surely lighten the burden on the CPU. (Up to 50% load can be reduced)
Another significant change is the way the browsers present their search results to you. Google ran a series of tests on both the browsers and concluded that Chrome incurs ~390 wakes over 30s and 0.3% CPU usage vs. Safari’s 120 wakes over 30s and 0.1% CPU usage. To make Chrome more efficient, the engineers pulled off Chrome’s timer firings and CPU use to 66%, bringing Google’s browser on par with Safari. This, in short, reduces the CPU load and decreases the process time.
On capitalone.com, Chrome incurred ~1010 wakeups over 30s vs. Safari’s ~490 wakes, in the previous version. Reducing the timer findings, Chrome will now incur ~721 wakeups over 30s.
A similar timer reduction was done for other websites like amazon.com and thus the wakups were decreased over lesser time variables.
Some of these changes may not make sense to you, but we can tell you that the performance you will experience and the efficiency Chrome will provide you with will surely bring the browser, if not in front of, at least on par with Apple’s Safari.
A few of the future steps outlining the changes can be found on senior Chrome engineer Peter Kasting’s Google+.
The Beta version of this new iteration of Chrome will be out in a few days which means that the public release will follow in the months to come.
