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Chrome is a battery killer

ALW1026

ALW1026

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 14, 2016
72
7
I have a MBP 16 inch
For work I use chrome with about 10 tabs open, A couple terminal sessions and One note. Monitor on 60%
I start work at 8 with 100% battery.. By 11 the battery is down to 15%
Is this normal?
Is there a fix

Let me add. I have a new battery. Only 3 cycles
 
Last edited:
ALW1026

ALW1026

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 14, 2016
72
7
jav6454 said:
Nope, I highly doubt a 3 hour web browsing session is normal. Something besides Chrome is chugging battery.
Click to expand...
When I look at Activity Monitor it shows Chrome as the biggest user. Do you know anything else I can check?
 
S

Sheepish-Lord

macrumors 68030
Oct 13, 2021
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Is yours the Intel model? I can watch Twitch@1080p all day long on my current gen MBP 16” and still have battery life left…
 
ALW1026

ALW1026

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 14, 2016
72
7
UPDATE****** I saw a post on a different board that said to update Chrome and make sure its on latest version.
That helped. Instead of going from 100- 15% in 3 hrs I went from 97-49% in 3.5 hours
 
S

Sheepish-Lord

macrumors 68030
Oct 13, 2021
2,530
5,148
ALW1026 said:
Yes its a I9
Click to expand...
This is most likely one of your issues. That cpu is a hot beast so battery life will always take a hit. Chrome runs pretty dang well on m-series processors but on the intel chips Safari is definitely the better option if possible.
 
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xraydoc

xraydoc

Contributor
Oct 9, 2005
11,031
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192.168.1.1
Chrome by default uses GPU acceleration. While it helps with performance, it’ll activate the dedicated GPU in your i9 Intel MacBook. That’ll definitely drain some battery.

Try turning this off and see if there’s any improvement in battery life.
 
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Slitted

macrumors newbie
Dec 8, 2014
27
16
Sheepish-Lord said:
Is yours the Intel model? I can watch Twitch@1080p all day long on my current gen MBP 16” and still have battery life left…
Click to expand...
Twitch performs very well on Chrome on my M1 devices. Power usage is nearly as low as Twitch on Safari.

On the other hand, Firefox does really poorly. It consumed an additional 3W over Chrome for me on a Twitch 1080p/60 stream, which is 40–50% higher than Chrome.

It's a shame because I prefer Firefox for general use when not on Safari.
On the plus side, each of the 3 browsers seem to use the low-power-video pipeline when on a fullscreen YouTube video and have similar power use.
 
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Sheepish-Lord

macrumors 68030
Oct 13, 2021
2,530
5,148
Slitted said:
Twitch performs very well on Chrome on my M1 devices. Power usage is nearly as low as Twitch on Safari.

On the other hand, Firefox does really poorly. It consumed an additional 3W over Chrome for me on a Twitch 1080p/60 stream, which is 40–50% higher than Chrome.

It's a shame because I prefer Firefox for general use when not on Safari.
On the plus side, each of the 3 browsers seem to use the low-power-video pipeline when on a fullscreen YouTube video and have similar power use.
Click to expand...
Just something how about Safari and Twitch work make it a bad experience. Example; watching a Twitch stream with the quality set to auto. Now open a new tab with Twitch still playing in the background and Twitch will downgrade the quality (all browsers do this) but when you bring the Twitch tab back to your primary it will not readjust the quality so you have to manually do this or force it to highest quality which eats up huge amounts of memory especially if you continue to work in other tabs.
 
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pshufd

macrumors G4
Oct 24, 2013
10,152
14,575
New Hampshire
I use Firefox with Ublock Origin and I get about 14 hours on my MacBook Pro 16. My backup browser is Brave and that gets great battery life too. It's unfortunate that you have to use a heavy-duty ad, tracking, malware blockers but that's just the nature of the internet today.
 
Heliotropen

Heliotropen

macrumors regular
Feb 23, 2016
224
34
Sudo Powermetrics

Then scroll to the bottom to see your real life energy consumptions

I work with like 30 clients that each need their own google account for 25 services each.
So I'm using brave; that way I can setup a profile for each client as in chrome; energy consumption feels a bit better than chrome but not that much.

If only safari could have multiple "profiles" or "users".
 
edubfromktown

edubfromktown

macrumors 6502a
Sep 14, 2010
844
712
East Coast, USA
ALW1026 said:
I have a MBP 16 inch
For work I use chrome with about 10 tabs open, A couple terminal sessions and One note. Monitor on 60%
I start work at 8 with 100% battery.. By 11 the battery is down to 15%
Is this normal?
Is there a fix

Let me add. I have a new battery. Only 3 cycles
Click to expand...
No kidding...

So is Safari.

Duckduckgo browser for macOS and Android is what I use unless some lamely created website requires Chrome.
 
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TinyMito

TinyMito

macrumors 6502a
Nov 1, 2021
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Stop using Chrome? Edge has better battery life if you like Chromium browser?

Safari is best for battery life. Firefox is ok.
 
M

motrek

macrumors 68030
Sep 14, 2012
2,634
312
ALW1026 said:
I have a MBP 16 inch
For work I use chrome with about 10 tabs open, A couple terminal sessions and One note. Monitor on 60%
I start work at 8 with 100% battery.. By 11 the battery is down to 15%
Is this normal?
Is there a fix

Let me add. I have a new battery. Only 3 cycles
Click to expand...

Different web sites use different amounts of power. Go to the 'Window' menu in Chrome and then 'Task Manager.'

This will bring up a window showing you how much CPU power each of your tabs is using.

I suspect that you've been keeping a tab open that uses a lot of CPU power.

Edit: Also, it's not convenient to plug your laptop in while you're working?
 
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