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.

I’ve always been a multiple-browser kind of person. I used to prefer the aesthetic of Google Chrome and its angled tabs and great looking favicons in the browser. I used Firefox for website debugging and testing, but most of the time it supported nearly every standard out there.

But I was never able to really stick with Safari. Safari has always been capable, but I just didn’t prefer the design. Until Safari Technology Preview.

Safari Technology Preview is a long name for the beta version of Safari that I’ve been using exclusively on my new MacBook Pro ever since I got it in late July. I’ve always been at the least a two-browser guy, usually switching between Google Chrome and Safari, and 75% of my time would be in Chrome.

Not anymore. Safari (specifically Safari Technology Preview) has been outstanding for me. The most annoying thing for me has been resolved as well - favicons in tabs. That’s now a setting that you can toggle on and off and it also looks great on pinned tabs as well. I know it seems like a small thing to most people, but I even had John Gruber on Twitter respond to me talking about them - this was a very important visual thing in the browser to a lot of people.

Safari is fast. Granted, you can only get it on a Mac, but Safari consistently beats out Chrome, Opera, and Firefox in HTML load speed tests. There are also great privacy features as well - one thing as a Chrome user that you always need to assume is that Google is tracking, logging and even predicting your every keystroke online. Now I don’t visit any sites that I shouldn’t, so I’m not afraid of anyone tracking me - I just don’t want it. I know that Google is tracking me in other ways, but the problem is not that Google is tracking me to make my experience better, but that they’re tracking me to sell my data to the highest bidder. And when you give Google an inch, they’ll take a mile.

If it’s been a while since you took a look at Safari, I’d invite you to go back and try it. It’s already on your Mac, and if you want bleeding-edge versions of it, you can download Safari Technology Preview, now available through software update on macOS Mojave.