At least for me, that's partly because Chrome makes it _so_ easy to "overuse" it. I'm right now writing this comment in a window with 29 tabs open, I have three other chrome windows with 22, 17, and 14 tabs open respectively. It's sitting there at 42.3 in the Energy Impact column and 32.23 in the Avg column - but to be fair it's got a whole bunch of stuff going on (two separate gmail instances and a fair few other javascript-heavy webapps as well). I've probably go more bogomips going on in this one browser window that all the machines I learnt to program on were capable of between them...
Hmm… comparing that to the amount of tabs and windows I have open in Safari right now (which is actually pretty low for me since I usually have more than 250 tabs open) seems to make Chrome look even worse…
Specifically (running Safari v7.1 on OS X v10.9.5), I have 18 windows open containing 2, 18, 26, 16, 2, 12, 17, 13, 21, 6, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, and 4 tabs for a grand total of 147 tabs. Oh, and I forgot to mention, it’s also downloading two files in the background right now. It’s showing up with 13.2 in the Energy Impact column and 4.47 in the Avg column.
(Oh, and since I already have it open, I may as well mention that Firefox 39.0 shows up as around 14.7 in the Energy Impact column (although it keeps spiking to 23.9 every few seconds) and 2.99 in the Avg column with 2 tabs open in 1 window with no downloads).
I'm at 47.91 average impact for FF 40.0 with uBlock Origin and Ghostery, no Flash installed. Doing local web development and poking around some news sites to read about all these market crashes. Only a few tabs open at a time for me.
