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> significantly less power

This is the big issue for most people, I think. I would love to use Chrome, but when I do, (a) thighs burn to a crisp if my machine is on my lap directly and (b) the battery depletes, literally, 1.5x as fast.




I've noticed this using Chrome on Ubuntu. Is Firefox the best alternative, (is it significantly more efficient?) or can you suggest something else?


Chromium has a bit less bloat than chrome, but less features correspondingly. Aside from that, firefox seems to be the big contender.


Epiphany works pretty well for me, I've been forced to customize the User-Agent string to that of Chrome to make certain things like Outlook Web App treat it like a Real Browser(TM), on occasion I have to use Firefox still (Plex doesn't work in epiphany) but overall it works fine.

I should note that Epiphany is the only Linux web browser that seems to interact with touch screens correctly, drag-to-scroll works wonderfully on my XPS 13 meanwhile Chrome and Firefox just keep trying to highlight text.


Epiphany is also based upon GtkWebKit, which is a Gtk port of the same engine that runs Safari.


why is that? does safari use some undocumented api, or that chrome sucks up more computing power in the name of rendering speed/responsiveness?


It's the latter. From what I've noticed, Chrome engages the dedicated GPU to speed up rendering. This by itself will cause a spike in power usage.


Yet Safari must be doing something with the GPU too, it scrolls quicker. I guess there's just more incentive to optimise a platform for Apple.


I think it's just a lack of optimization for battery usage on OSX Chrome. Google seems to have recently realized it is an issue though and is making progress on improving things: https://plus.google.com/+PeterKasting/posts/GpL63A1K2TF




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