Does Chrome Burn Through More Power Than Firefox?

[movieman]

I also think you may not have been testing fully realistically. What happens when you just open a few websites in tabs and let it idle with a bunch of Flash ads playing?

Surely if you care about power consumption then blocking Flash ads will be one of the first things you do?

When I still ran Windows on my old laptop I used to be regularly annoyed when I noticed my battery had dropped 50% in the last half hour and discovered some Flash crap running in a window I hadn't looked at in that time.

[Sidicas]

To me, on older hardware, Chromium has been the obvious choice for a while now. It really does squeeze a lot of performance out of a little bit of hardware. The luxury of having parts of the browser written in assembly language.

My Desktops run firefox though.

[smitty3268]

Surely if you care about power consumption then blocking Flash ads will be one of the first things you do?

When I still ran Windows on my old laptop I used to be regularly annoyed when I noticed my battery had dropped 50% in the last half hour and discovered some Flash crap running in a window I hadn't looked at in that time.

Well, OK. I can think of a few useful tests.

1. Playing some Flash video on Youtube.
2. Loading a few common websites in tabs and idling, with Adblock active. I'm guessing Michael hates Adblock enough to never do this, though.
3. Do the same, while not blocking Flash/ads.

I can sort of see how a 4th test run while doing some JS test might be an interesting additional test, but it would be by FAR the least useful IMHO. Unfortunately, that's the only 1 michael tested here.

[Sidicas]

In my opinion, I think a proper Browser test should be to take a few random pages from each of the top 100 websites on the Internet (ads, flash content, animated gifs, javascript, flash videos (play from start to end), etc. etc..).. Create a local download / copy of all that and see how the browsers perform rendering through all that, pushing the content into 3 or 4 open tabs...

The existing benchmarks seem to be very specialized making them pretty irrelevant for real-world use.

As far as CPU usage on flash content, I'd think that entirely depends on what version of the flash plugin you have and what features are getting pushed off to the GPU..

On some of the javascript benchmarks (like the V8 javascript test) Chromium wins by a landslide, I've seen some results show Firefox getting slaughtered nearly 10:1 (with newer versions of Firefox, it now appears to only be about 2:1).. On other Javascript benchmarks, Firefox is faster.. So it only makes sense to pull REAL content right from the web to benchmark with.. No more synthetics!

[madbiologist]

Note to Michael - Yes, I would like to see further testing with Firefox 6, Firefox 7 beta and Chrome/Chromium 14 please.

The MS tests are very interesting, but I'm not sure they mean much when it comes to Linux testing.

For starters, Firefox/IE9 are able to use the GPU much more on Win7 than Chrome is, which they claim is the reason for their lower power usage. That's not really the case on Linux since OpenGL layers aren't enabled and I think both should be using XRender (I know FF is, and assume that Chrome probably is). They are also using completely different toolkits, etc. on Linux which could cause big differences.

More hardware-accelerated OpenGL stuff has been enabled on a wider array of hardware in Firefox 6, which is one reason why I would like to see testing with Firefox 6. I agree about the potential difference between Linux and Win7 due to different toolkits.

ssam wrote - "I think [animated] gifs and flash still get rendered in a hidden tab."

In Flash Player 10.1 SWFs (flash videos) on hidden tabs and/or SWFs scrolled out of view are throttled, resulting in a dramatic reduction in CPU usage. See http://www.kaourantin.net/2010/03/timing-it-right.html
Unfortunately this does not work on Linux (nor on Opera 10.1 on Windows) - see the second part of http://www.kaourantin.net/2010/04/pr...-continue.html

[Geri]

Chrome eats more power, becose it can properly utilize all cpu core in the system, due to the better multiprocessing/multithreading, and the far better quality of the code. Firefox only can run plugins an a different process, so complitely lacks this capability, wich is very giant design flaw in 2011.

[madbiologist]

Chrome eats more power, becose it can properly utilize all cpu core in the system, due to the better multiprocessing/multithreading, and the far better quality of the code. Firefox only can run plugins an a different process, so complitely lacks this capability, wich is very giant design flaw in 2011.

Mozilla's Electrolysis project is tackling this issue. I think Electrolysis is coming to Firefox in Firefox 7 or Firefox 8 - I couldn't find the relevant web page.

[madbiologist]

OK, it looks like Electrolysis (also known as e10s) will be coming to Firefox later than I thought. From the Mozilla Platform Meeting Minutes: 2011-08-16:

Firefox Development

• Ongoing e10s work:

* e10s-compat build time flag has browser standing up, but no progress events
* felipe is working on having the WPL listeners work (bug 666801)
* coming week we’re going to be filing some additional bugs and directing fx-team’s full attention to them (bug fxe10s)

Note that the build-time switch is actually –enable-e10s-compat

[madbiologist]

If anyone is interested, the Mozilla QA team posted the following on Sunday, 21 August 2011:

We’ll be having a testday next Friday for Firefox 7 Beta. This is an excellent opportunity to start getting involved for newcomers and experts alike. Stay tuned as details will be posted very shortly.

and:

If you’d like to help us test or simply learn what is involved with testing Firefox, come join us in #qa and ask us how you can help with Firefox 7, 8, or 9.

[Geri]

Thank you for the relevant informations. I personally will wait for the final official and automated installers, i dont like to play with such settings.