Image curtesy of Cocktails & Coffee.

This is nothing new, and has been documented. But here's my story.

I recently had to download Google Chrome for something I was working on. Occasionally, you get that edge-case website that won't work well on Safari or another browser, and you have to download the Internet Explorer of 2023.

I work on a Mac, and Chrome has never been great with battery life on the Mac. Let me rephrase that: Chrome has always been atrocious with battery life on the Mac. And it had been years since I opened it on a desktop.

I was greeted by the slim styling of the tabs, the plugins requesting access. I've always liked the design of Chrome, I just don't like the designers.

I poked through the Settings for a second, and to my surprise, there was a battery saver feature. I thought to myself, "Maybe this time will be different."

So I gave it the old college try for 3 days.

Browsing was smooth and fast, plugins and extensions worked after updating. But it still looked like it was sucking down my battery faster than it should.

I left my laptop overnight, unplugged, on my kitchen table, with the lid closed but Chrome still running. I had 84% battery when I closed the lid. 14 hours later when I opened it, I got a low battery warning - 10%.

I have a two year old M1 Pro Macbook Pro. It hardly ever gives me a low battery warning. I can edit on Final Cut Pro 4K footage for several hours before it does. I can surf on Safari all day. I can write in Obsidian with the wi-fi off for 12 hours straight and not get a low battery warning. I also didn't have anything else open besides Mimestream (email app), and Obsidian (notes app).

Chrome sucked 70% of my battery in 14 hours, with the screen off and the computer in standby. Why?

I was running the most recent version. I was also only running 3 extensions, not 30.

I could go through all the reasons why it did this, from RAM usage to using too much CPU, even when the Mac was in standby. But the base reason is just the fact that Chrome is still not a well-written app for the Mac. And it probably never will be.

My advice: don't use Chrome, especially on the Mac. Privacy concerns aside, it kills your batter by using too much power that it doesn't need and the developers in Mountain View don't think it's important enough to rewrite it.

So use Safari. Or Arc. Or Firefox. Or anything else. Just don't use Chrome.

My Vivaldi tab bar.

I have a love/hate relationship with Safari on the Mac. I absolutely refuse to use Chrome for a number of reasons (data privacy, battery consumption, etc.). But I love Chrome's simple design and extensions. Firefox is fast and light, but I don't like the design. Opera is cool, Opera GX is even cooler. Brave is also neat but again, I didn't like its design.

A few weeks ago I came across this video by the YouTube channel A Better Computer where he talked about the Vivaldi browswer. And ever since downloading and trying it, I've been really happy with it.

Vivaldi is (to the best of my knowledge) built on Chromium, the same as Google Chrome. You can even run web extenstions from the Chrome Store, which is sweet. 1Password is the extension I use the most, and it works great most of the time.

What I really like about Vivaldi is the way that you can make it look the way you want. You can style any color. You can give your tabs that rounded look like Chrome (something I was really looking for, honestly - don't know why it's so important to me).

Vivaldi has seemed fast and light, like a browser should be. Every site I've tried has worked so far, unlike Safari (really, Apple? After all this time?).

There are a lot of browsers to choose from, and you're probably set on the one you use, but if you're frustrated every other day with your current browser, download Vivaldi and give it a try.