Massive Safari battery drain

[Mats Bjornstrom]

I have terrible battery life on my iPhone 6 running iOS 8.4.1. As you can see in the screenshot, it will die after 10 hours. Safari uses 55% of the battery, despite quite light usage. Safari will average 40% battery usage in the "Last 7 days" tab. Usage will always be 50%+ of what standby is.


(Pardon the Swedish)

Things I have tried that haven't worked so far:

– Reset Safari
– Turned off Safari reading list, and deleted everything in it
– Changed iCloud passwords
– Turned off location services & background refresh
– Completely turned off iCloud on the phone for a few days, no change
– Had the whole phone replaced (due to a clicking screen issue) once.
– Full reset and restore from backup
– Full reset without restoring from backup, set up as a new phone. I couldn't believe even this didn't solve it!

The only thing that DOES work is if I manually close Safari in the multitasking view, and use Chrome instead. Chrome uses a fair amount of CPU as well but it gets me through the day. I've done this for a few months and don't like chrome so would like to go back to Safari.

Any advice on what I could try next – I feel like I've literally tried everything!

 

[C DM]

So you are saying that let's say in those 24 hours your usage of Safari wasn't about half of what you were using the phone for?

 

[Mats Bjornstrom]

So you are saying that let's say in those 24 hours your usage of Safari wasn't about half of what you were using the phone for?

Thanks for your reply. No, I wouldn't say its representative of my actual usage. The usage number will keep ticking up even when I let the phone rest for an hour. If I force quit Safari and then let it rest, the usage is significantly lower. There seems to be background activity going on thats draining the battery.

During the time I've been using Chrome, I get longer battery life. And I've heard that Chrome on iOS is actually supposed to be less power efficient than Safari?

 

[C DM]

Thanks for your reply. No, I wouldn't say its representative of my actual usage. The usage number will keep ticking up even when I let the phone rest for an hour. If I force quit Safari and then let it rest, the usage is significantly lower. There seems to be background activity going on thats draining the battery.

During the time I've been using Chrome, I get longer battery life. And I've heard that Chrome on iOS is actually supposed to be less power efficient than Safari?

All the iOS browsers basically use the same rendering engine that Safari uses (the main difference is in not being able to use a more powerful/faster JavaScript engine that Safari can use). That said, perhaps it's what you have open in Safari (some site or something like that) that might be behind it? Do you have a lot of tabs open? Are any of them heavy on some media or ads or anything like that?

 

[Mats Bjornstrom]

All the iOS browsers basically use the same rendering engine that Safari uses (the main difference is in not being able to use a more powerful/faster JavaScript engine that Safari can use). That said, perhaps it's what you have open in Safari (some site or something like that) that might be behind it? Do you have a lot of tabs open? Are any of them heavy on some media or ads or anything like that?

I usually have around 5-7 tabs visible on average. They don't appear to be loaded in memory as Safari has a terrible habit of refreshing them as soon as I switch between even two tabs. The problem has been going on for many months, and doesn't seem linked to the tab situation.. but I could try and keep it down to just one tab and see if it makes a difference. Thanks for your input!