I wanted to see which modern browser was the fastest on my Mac laptop, but I don’t trust out of date benchmarks posted by CNET, and I run beta browsers with a bunch of plugins enabled…some of which can impact performance (like ad blockers).

I’ve seen all the claims that Safari is better than Chrome, but a claim without data is just a story, and I haven’t seen any tests that included the use of plugins. So I ran my own Web 3 Basemark Tests, in a loop loading a specified Gmail folder as well as my reddit home page until my battery died.

Note that I don’t consider the total times to be relevant, as these benchmarks push the machine and CPU pretty hard - harder than most do while using the web….what’s important is the difference.

Each browser had the same set of plugins loaded (1Password, uBlock Origin, Zoom, Amazon Assistant).

Here’s my results (totally 100% scientific):

Browser Benchmark Result Battery Life
Chrome 69 640.97 93 min
Firefox 62 499.94 130 min
Safari 62 (tech preview) 609.11 161 min

For me, I will miss a couple of my ancillary (but not super important) plugins from Chrome at the benefit of a significant increase in battery life by moving to Safari.