Battery life seems like an afterthought for anything other than Safari (and back when it was Trident-based, MS Edge on Windows), which is kinda weird when one considers how laptops have come to dominate computing.

Was Edge based on Trident? I thought they re-wrote an engine from scratch.

Edge technically used EdgeHTML, but EdgeHTML was a fork of Trident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML

old edge was trident (which came from IE) new edge is based on chromium

From my understanding, Chromium/WebKit/V8 and Firefox/Gecko/Spidermonkey are the last (major) contenders in the browser engine space. After Opera switched to WebKit in 2013. And Edge in 2020. I'm sure there are numerous lesser known ones...

Google forked from WebKit in 2013, at this point there might be huge differences between WebKit and blink. Someone more knowledgeable might add something to this.

Chrome (Blink) and WebKit are two different engines.

It's Chrome dominating, Webkit a somewhat distant second [1], and Firefox a third, quickly disappearing into oblivion [2].

[1] There's a huge number of weird versions of WebKit running on TVs and such.

[2] It's barely around 200M users, but it's bleeding users slowly and surely https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity and https://news.itsfoss.com/firefox-decline/

    * Blink (Google)
    * WebKit2 (Apple and some folks, mainly WebKit2Gtk)
    * Gecko (Mozilla)

    Microsofts Trident is dead, they now use Blink.  
    Operas Presto is dead, they now use Blink.
    KDEs KHTML (the predecessor of WebKit1) is dead.  

Google is dominating, pushing through Android, all Googles-Services and Microsoft Edge. A reason to worry because Google controls the Web and the Engine. Furthermore implementing an entire new engine seems an enormous effort. For instance Microsoft only allows usage of Microsoft Teams Web with a webbrowser based upon Blink. So were back in 2002?

WebKit features also WebKit2Gtk (Epiphany) and Qt5-webkit (Otter) with native integration. Both use the native toolkits, which is an advantage! Interaction with the open-source community around WebKit seems rather good and the engine is integrated by others. Gecko seems not to be integrated by others but by forks only? You remember when Chrome was considered slick and fast? Originally Chrome used the native toolkit on every platform. Now Chrome ships and own toolkit, similar to Firefox.

And? Maybe there is a new engine on the block:

https://github.com/SerenityOS/ladybird

PS: I think the Epiphany guys doing a nice job but need more developers. The upcoming release will support Web-Extensions.

I use teams.microsoft.com in Firefox all work week without issue.

I wish Mozilla had been able to keep pushing harder with their servo project. IIRC, one of the earliest upsides I remember hearing about to justify creating Rust (in order to build servo) was that the increased safety with regards to concurrency could allow a web renderer to parallelise computation across _underclocked_ cores, thereby setting a new benchmark for battery consumption.

Granted, that was more about mobile devices but it still stuck with me. Effortless and safe concurrency would tip the scales to having hundreds of low power cores instead of a dozen high powered cores. I want that world, esp for mobile devices and laptops.

When I worked on Firefox for Android, we were constantly fighting for the broader Firefox org to take mobile more seriously —- if Gecko excelled on mobile with respect to power consumption, then a lot of that would spill over to desktop platforms “for free.”

Unfortunately nothing had improved by the time I left in 2021.

This. Firefox drains battery, but still less than Docker & a TypeScript dev environment. Using those three together means my M1 Air falls a LONG WAY SHORT of the 18hr battery life I was promised

Sounds like a problem with the os. Ever consider switching?

Is there an OS and hardware combination you suggest for 18 hours of Firefox, TypeScript, and Docker?

I had to do a double take when I read the parent, but I suspect they were referring to running Linux to avoid the Virtual Machine overhead on MacOS. However I doubt the Linux driver support for the M1/M2 has anywhere near the level of power optimization as the MacOS drivers.

Linux, ThinkPad T470 with the big 95Wh battery.

Bonus: Charging your mobile phone takes less percents off your battery life than with a macbook.

There isn't any other OS that you'd want to run as a daily driver on that hardware platform atm. Linux support is still immature/incomplete, and IIRC Windows support is completely absent. (Some of the people working on the Linuc port are also porting to some of the free Unices, too, which I assume are in a similarly incomplete state.)

If you think that persons battery life woes are bad, you should see how horrible my Windows/Ubuntu Intel work laptop is when running the same software.

Having the same issue, patiently waiting for Asahi Linux to deliver.

To quote the article:

  Did they work? Yes! Performance on lightly loaded systems was about the same as OSSpinLock but on loaded ones, they provided massively better responsiveness. They also did something extremely useful for laptop users: they cut down power consumption as a lot less cycles were wasted having the CPUs spinning on locks that couldn’t be acquired.

To no one's surprise, one has to use Apple's undocumented APIs to be able to match Safari's power use.

This conclusion does not have sufficient supporting evidence in the blog post.

Odd that you’re being downvoted. If the article had shown that Safari or the system allocator used this locking strategy then that would be evidence, otherwise the person you responded to is just making things up

Memory allocation is one of many differences between the browsers.

Or implement their own locks and support structures to eke out performance [1]. Hat tip to @pizlonator.

1. https://webkit.org/blog/6161/locking-in-webkit/