Unreasonable, for sure. I may not be in the several hundreds of tabs open at any given time, but definitely around a hundred. I gave up on Chrome for this specific reason, it'd just kill my battery in no time, whereas I can go an entire work day with Safari and still have battery left for an episode of SV. I routinely have ridiculous amounts of tabs open (for no good reasons) and Safari so far has been the only browser able to cope without draining my battery in no time.
My main reason for ditching Chrome in favor of Safari, aside from the fact that Safari is ridiculously fast, is that Chrome is a memory hog. The way I browse, with so many tabs open and lots of flipping back and forth, Chrome routinely eats around 4gb of memory in total, whereas Safari uses somewhere in the vicinity of 50%-75% of that. (Looking at it right now, it's at 1.86gb.)
I don't think Safari is the perfect browser by any means, but it's the best one I've used so far.
A classic example of finding a technical solution to a human problem. If you have a hundred tabs open, you're problem is the hundred tabs and not your browser.
I do almost the same as you, but with Firefox under Windows. A year ago I had to switch to the beta channel because the memory leaks in the "satble" version would crash it on restart (I have it configured to reload the previous session).
A few months later problems began with beta version. Things got nasty when they tried the multiprocess architecture (which luckily has disappeared for good). Now (v 47) they've found a sweet spot.
I have also slightly modified my usage patterns to mitigate the problem:
* I would open one "main page" (HN, for example) and keep that open, refreshing and loading tabs in that window related to news, discussions, posts, etc. I'd never close this tab/window. -> (what I suspect) this would cause FF to keep hundreds (thousands?) of URLs and state in memory to respond to the Shift+T (reopen tab) command.
* I now close the "main window" more often, and thus keep this behaviour at bay. This alone must be the one thing that impacted the browsers stability.
* I try to keep less than 6 windows open at the same time (one with my email accounts, facebook main page, etc, another one for reddit/HN, and then specific windows for different topics).
I haven't had to modify my habits any further fortunately. But I did use to have 20+ windows with ~20 tabs each in average.
Honestly, Chromes UI for lots of tabs sucks as well. Safari has multiple allowances for it and never shrinks tabs down into a tiny, useless state[1] nor does Safari have a tab limit.
Frankly, Chrome sucks with a lot of tabs and sucks at conserving power, on a laptop it loses out on the two things that actually matter to me.
I have a similar use pattern, and the short answer is: it isn't worth bookmarking. I (we?) are reading a lot and evaluating if it's even worth keeping. Once I've decided if it's worth keeping then yes, I will bookmark. But first I have to scan through the bunch of documents/pages/topics I have opened and see if they're of any use.
I tried that, but it ended up just being a dump of oh so many bookmarks and I'd spend more time searching, finding all sorts of interesting stuff in my dumps of bookmarks, open those up, and then all of a sudden I'm back to having loads and loads of tabs open.
It would be great if browsers had an option to only allow one instance of a certain website. Half my problem is opening multiple tabs of gmail, whatsapp and facebook, for example, when i'm only actually looking for one instance of them.
Pinnes tabs solve that, actually. Whenever I hit a Facebook link or whatever it just switches to and navigates the Facebook tab to the URL. This is an awesome feature and probably singelhandedly responsible for cutting my tab count by the tens anyway. Still not enough, but definitely a step in the right direction.
Do you mean pinned tabs? It doesn't switch to the existing tab for me on chrome with osx. In what environment does this work because I'm very interested in it.
Oh sorry, I meant in Safari. Pinned tabs in Chrome was the killer feature that kept me around. When Safari finally got them I switched in a heart beat and haven't looked back since. (Other than for dev.)
I manage 100 tabs and use vimium to search through them. I like this workflow and it's productive. I could close them and manage a bunch of bookmarks, but I find this is better for me.
Rule number 1 for the interaction between humans and the computer is to never blame the user. Humans are the way they are and hard to change, you are programming for them, so you need to take into account how they use your program. If you provide tabs, they will leave tons of tabs open.
You seem to be getting down voted, but honestly I agree with you. If there was an option to limit the amount of tabs I can have open, I totally would use it and limit it all to 10, maybe even just 5. Thing is, this isn't so much a conscious choice – it just happens!
I read something, there's an interesting link. I open a tab in the background and continue reading. Maybe I go back to the tab, find a couple more interesting links and open those in the background. Of course, there's also the link that's so obviously just bait, but I'm a weak man so I click it, then feel bad, like I just had a whole big bag of candy on my own or something. Anyway, rinse and repeat and hey presto – 150 tabs are open in no time.
I fundamentally agree with you, but I'm like a chain smoker, except my vice is the humble HTML anchor...
I tend to have the same browsing habits and it was a huge drain on my resources until I started using OneTab. It's a Chrome extension that saves all your tabs on a window and lets you reopen them all at once or one at a time whenever.
I used to do something similar. Nowadays I put stuff I want to read into <insert fav read later service> and read them later if I'm not going to do it right away.
> All the web browsers used their default configuration, without any add-ons or toolbars installed.
My raw, untested guess is that using Firefox with some strict adblocking/flashblocking etc. tools might reduce its power usage due to less HTTP requests, less CPU/GPU time wasted (though OTOH the add-ons may increase the CPU load to do their job, so it's non-obvious).
One large factor is forcing the system to tick every millisecond instead of every 15.6 milliseconds, which both Firefox and Chrome are currently doing on my computer.
Is there any way to make Windows ignore those requests?
Tickless by itself doesn't guarantee that the system won't be woken up periodically by an application timer. It simply guarantees that the system won't wake up needlessly if there are no timers to serve.
Timer coalescing, which I believe Windows also implement, does help by both setting a minium resolution to timer frequency and making sure that timers wake up in batches.
They aren't comparing apples with apples. Ad blocking is only enabled in the power saving mode. This alone would save a lot of CPU. IMO they should show a comparison with ad blocking enabled in both situations.
Does anyone know how different is power management of Chrome on ChromeOS from Chrome on other OSes? Chromebooks are known for long battery life is that because of power management or is there more in this?
Exactly. I recently discovered that my iPhone on battery-saving mode is awesome, and now I put it on that mode even when its 100%, so it holds longer. Everything works fine. I havent found anything wrong. Apple should mak that mode the default mode. Battery-saving mode should be default on all things.
There are of course things like screen brightness or gaming performance that dont mix well with the above, but thats fine. Leave the brightness alone, and resume the battery-saving mode after the game is closed.
So basically, default mode should be battery-saving mode. Performance mode should be used automatically when a fame or something is running. And make a new battery-saving mode which is the default mode plus the low brightness, no games, no wifi, no whatever mode.
> So basically, default mode should be battery-saving mode.
The default mode is already a battery-saving one, you can get an impression of a non-battery-saving mode by playing a game continuously, your battery will get run into the ground in 2~3h.
> Am I missing something?
Low Power Mode is not about downclocking the phone and trying to sip power, it's about disabling a number of features which can already be disabled individually, but which (as far as Apple is concerned anyway) most users want/use:
* animated transitions
* automatic mail fetch
* Hey Siri
* background app refresh
* automatic downloads
* wifi association/roaming
* night shift
In essence, LPM makes the smartphone less smart to try and last a bit longer. If these are smarts you don't need, you could disable them all along.
It does a lot more than lower brightness and cap clock speeds, it also disables night-shift and screws with all of the background process and predictive fetching, etc which the OS does.
I guess it does, since it saves so much power compared to running without the battery-saving mode. Still, I haven't noticed anything not working as expected, in my daily use.
Often there are tradeoffs. E.g. when I put my phone in powersaving mode the dimmed screen is very hard to read in bright sunlight. My browser not processing background tabs might be a useful feature sometimes, but when I'm listening to music on Youtube it would be a real inconvenience.
Desktop Safari doesn't have a 'power saving mode' and it consumer less power than Chrome. Apparently MS Edge is the same (I don't use Windows so I can't know). These browsers don't have user-visible tradeoffs, they're just more power efficient.
Or is this just a case of Chrome being really really unoptimised and power hungry?
I have no idea about specific browser implementations. I know I perceive Safari and Edge as less responsive than Chrome, which could easily be due to tradeoffs they make for power consumption.
It's really frustrating how much the web, software, and computers in general are being gimped for everyone just to support the "mobile" segment of the market.
Sometimes I try to squeeze more battery time from my old laptop, and I look for processes hogging the cpu. Invariably I see Firefox consuming 30-40% cpus and I have to hunt down those misbihaving tabs that, even idle, keep the cpu awake.
The reality is that today saving power matters everywhere. On mobile and laptops means a longer lasting battery and/or lighter device; on a desktop and laptop it means a quieter machine; on the datacenter, power usage is probably the most important cost today.
Even on desktops or when laptops are plugged in we should concern ourselves with power usage. If something can be optimized for power usage, it should be.
"Longer battery life" can be restated as: a lower ambient temperature for your room/office; less CPU cooler fan noise; a lower power bill; the ability to pack more servers per rack in a co-lo environment (yes, servers run browsers–headless ones, for spidering/scraping); etc. It can even be restated in terms of extra performance, when you consider technologies like Intel's Turbo Boost.
Why did they test in High Performance power mode? The default is Balanced.
High Performance mode doesn't allow the CPU to downclock, keeping it at the maximum frequency at all times, even with zero load. It also maintains a higher screen brightness, and stops wifi and disks from entering power-saving modes too. This is NOT a negligible difference.
The _concept_ behind optimizing for energy savings in a browser is absolutely brilliant. Why pollute it by using such blatantly fake numbers?
Using HPM eliminates confounding factors. You won't get real world numbers because some of the benefit is provided by the OS/hardware, but you'll know if your changes are actually making a difference during the times that they are active.
I don't get your objection here. Not only does high-performance mode eliminate OS-level confounders that would otherwise render consumption deltas highly questionable, it does so in a way that produces worst-case results.
All that other stuff impacts battery life in a huge way. Those variables matter. You can't just remove them, call it a "worst case scenario", and walk away. That is not valid.
When a reputable site like Anandtech reviews a laptop, they don't force it to maximum performance mode, because nobody that cares about battery life would ever do that. It's testing a scenario that _doesn't matter_.
In fact, not only is it not the default, but maximum performance mode doesn't even _show_ by default-- you need to expand a "show additional plans" dropdown in the power control panel to see it. Opera went to the trouble to do that, and it was not by accident.
I think you're looking for a followup study that complements these results, but that study would be not as valuable as with these to inform their interpretation.
They state in the article that there are a lot of variables to account for when measuring battery savings - keeping it in high-performance mode likely makes it a more reliable control for testing against.
This is my very unscientific method, but it really seems to work. On my i7-4510 with FF I was using 7500mW. With opera I am using 5500mW. That is a pretty good savings. The only issue I am having is three finger swiping to go back and forth doesn't seem to work.
Hmm, kinda odd. Not sure if you are comparing this to Chrome, Safari or Edge but with those you have a lot less control over the start/speed-dial page. Use the gear icon in the upper right to edit nearly everything on the speed dial page including turning speed dial off.
One of the main reasons I switched to Opera was the ability to have more control over the start page.
The biggest reason to switch to Opera now is the ad blocker is much faster than ABP/Ghost/etc and web pages load significantly faster now.
With chrome you have more control over the start page, in that you can change it from the default one to a totally different one, but when comparing opera's speed dial to chrome's default start page Opera's is definitely far superior (and more customizable). The speed dial is the main reason I use opera as well (I like it much better than any speed dial addons for chrome/firefox, and even vivaldi's speed dial)
edit: apparently there are opera addons that allow you to load a custom page instead of the speed dial so that may also be a moot point anyway
I'm on Developer branch, so maybe it's different in the "normal" version.
When you open the start page, on the upper right corner you have a config button. Among other options there was "Speed Dial" check box. Is that what you wanted?
So I have a dropdown that shows me my open tabs (presumably not what you're talking about) in the upper right corner of the window.
A cog which lets me 'Customise start page' but expanding Navigation and unchecking Speed Dial did not disable speed dial.
On the top left I have a Menu but the only thing I can see to do with speed dial is a button which opens it in a new tab or focuses a tab which already has it open.
I really just want a blank page when I open a new tab.
Isn't that because the one prime power-saving browser (Safari) is simply power-saving by default? AFAIK it's the same story on Windows (with Edge).
Chrome is well known for being an all-power-consuming monster, having better power consumption than Chrome is hardly an achievement.