Chrome is Awful....

[it wasnt me]

I use Vivaldi.

Same here. Migrated from Firefox in 2017 when Failzilla had announced that they hate power users (and subsequently removed XUL) and I haven't looked back since.

 

[DankeBrutus]

I'm curious what Mac are you on?

On both my M1 MBP and M4 mini I see the same behaviour. For both Chromium browsers like Helium or Vivaldi and Gecko/Firefox. If I'm just browsing like usual it's not a problem. I can see in Activity Monitor they aren't performing worse than Safari. In same cases they are lighter. Even if I'm watching a video on YouTube all three engines perform more or less the same. The second I turn on PiP though, which I often do, Firefox and Chromium flip out. Chromium's web GPU helper hovers around 20% usage, peaks over 30%, and Firefox has a GPU helper as well on top of some kind of container process that combined have over 30% usage on the CPU. I'm pretty sure it's because neither Chromium or Firefox are using the "native" PiP of Safari/macOS. They use their own thing which is also limited in some ways, like not following you across fullscreen apps.

On a desktop like the mini this isn't a big deal, and tbh the battery life on my MBP is still really good. My battery health is only at 92% after almost 5 years. It's more that I feel as though this shouldn't be happening at all.

edit: to be fair Safari also spawns an extra process with PiP but in terms of resource usage it's a difference of ~10% vs 20-30%+.