Safari is slow, and worse for battery life
Safari. A convenient web browser that comes with your mac. I see a lot of newer Mac users still using Safari. And why not? It syncs bookmarks, history, reading lists, and even passwords with the rest of your iOS devices. And most importantly it's even supposed to have the best battery life! But for most people nowadays, Safari simply is too lackluster and unoptimized for most use cases. I have always recommended people to stop using Safari, but today I did some experiments on my own to fully disapprove most use cases for Safari
Safari is proven to be slower
To put it frankly, Safari is just slow and sluggish for most websites. I can attribute this mostly to my own experience. Now Apple actually claimed back in 2017 that Safari was the fastest browser for Mac. And in some applications, that is true. Shown below is the result of Antutu 5’s HTML 5 benchmark ran on Safari and a Chromium-based web browser Brave.
But, the next benchmark proves why Safari is so slow, sluggish, and laggy in loading any website with animations or interactive elements. Shown below with the Motionmark benchmark.
Look at that difference! Notice also that in the top what it said. “This webpage is using significant energy. Closing it may improve the responsiveness of your Mac.” That shows that the engine itself of Safari might not be bad, but it's just that most websites simply don’t really take the time to optimize Safari.
And why should they? Most computers in the world are running on Windows, and Safari only accounts for 4 percent of the browser market share.
So unless all your doing is browsing Wikipedia articles, Safari is going to be slower than other browsers for any complex websites with many elements. Not to mention a known fact that Google purposely screwed over any other browser that is not running on Chromium for all their websites. YouTube and GSuite applications have clearly been shown to be slow and animations to be choppy.
Safari might not actually save more battery life
Across other media outlets. It has always been claimed that “Safari is the best for battery life.” But if most websites are not optimized for Safari, how then could Safari be good for battery life? So then I went in and conducted another experiment of my own. I ran an online game, Mope.io on both the Chromium-based Brave browser and Safari. I had already predicted that Safari would do worst in battery life because I know Safari wouldn’t be optimized for any kind of animations and motion graphics. And not surprisingly I was right.
I ran the game for 10 minutes on both browsers. On Safari, in 10 minutes it drained from 89 percent to 72 percent. While on Brave in 10 minutes it drained from 71 percent to 60 percent. So in total Safari drained 6 percent more on my battery compared to Brave.
The application of this test might not apply to some people. But this still at least proves that Safari is not going to save you more battery life on complex websites. In which nowadays is the majority of websites.
Conclusion
Browsing through any social media with Safari was clearly a worst experience and took more battery life from my mac. Using Google apps like Youtube or Google Docs with Safari is almost infuriating because it seems like Google purposely made the user experience worst. Overall I have found the animations and loading times for websites on Safari less than stellar compared to any other browser. And what is worth? A better battery life? For any website that Safari is slow in loading it probably also means that it is not optimized for Safari’s engine, which means it’s also more likely to take more battery life, not less. If you are still loyal to Safari, I suggest at least giving other browsers a try before using only Safari.
