> ...if you're developing the browser is not your main energy drain.

This has not been my experience, but maybe that's just because I use an ancient text editor (Emacs). If my several-year-old computer with 8GB of RAM goes into a paging frenzy, the browser is usually at fault. Emacs may be using a few hundred megabytes at most.

As for privacy concerns, it's your call. Apple sells expensive hardware; Google sells surveillance-based advertising; Mozilla... sells its search box to either Google or Microsoft? I've made my uneasy peace with this choice.

Can't vouch for your ancient machine or text editor, but writing and compiling on a modern machine with intellisense, the editor uses a lot more energy than the browser

https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~weimer/p/weimer-asplos2014.pdf

This paper didn't seem to deal specifically with compilers, editors, browsers, or intellisense. But I'm curious what counts as "modern" -- how often should I replace my personal machine, or what should its specs be, so people like you don't call it "ancient"? (I already know that I should be using LightTable or Atom or IntelliJ to be "modern" in terms of editors.)

> Yes, lower power/memory usage equals better battery life at the cost of performance,

This is almost never actually the case. In reality, better performance tends to mean better battery due to improved usage of resources.

This is kind of a ridiculous statement.

Not a single category other than energy consumption does Safari benchmark near Chrome, Firefox or even Edge http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/best-browser-internet...

Any of you are free to offer actual data proving otherwise

Anecdotical I know but on mac, when using velocityjs to change the css transform value (translate, scale and rotate) of 100+ spans, Safari is faster and the animation is smoother than Chrome. I've tested that on an imac, a macbook pro and a mac pro. Also, they don't mention in the benchmark you've linked if they're benchmarking the windows version or the mac version of Chrome. The windows version is faster in quite a few cases in my experience.

Finally, while Chrome definitely has a better html5 compliance, there's one thing I hate about Chrome. It doesn't keep the state of the previous page when using the back button unlike Firefox, Safari and IE. See this: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=2879

Err, I didn't say anything about any browser. I said that performance and battery life are not at odds, they often go hand in hand.

Efficiency and energy use go hand and hand, performance and energy use often do not.

What?

The browser is 100% my main energy drain when I'm developing. Sublime Text barely takes up any of my power or memory.

Additionally, I don't use a single website where I noticed a performance hit when I switched from Chrome to Safari.