Its been a really long time but safari on Windows was a thing and it did run a lot leaner in the background than anything else available at the time (except Opera if memory serves).

It’s entirely possible that Safari is intentionally avoiding features that make it wake up-

I doubt that it does anything unavailable to other browsers, thats MS territory, because they wanted features. I feel like safari, by contrast, doesn't want to add features.

It's not impossible, but I doubt it, if only because very few third party applications use as much as Chrome does. The only exceptions are things that actively use a lot of CPU, like compilers or compressors.

Blessed or not, I still end up using Safari. The improvement in battery life is too significant to ignore

Have you compared versus Orion, which is also based on WebKit (and can run most Chrome and Firefox extensions)?

IME, Safari is no better than Brave in terms of battery, even when I’ve got hundreds of tabs open.

That's because optimizing for battery life is a stated goal of the Safari team, it's actively benchmarked

Totally guesswork here, but I'd say Chrome has a lot more telemetry, profiling and tracking built-in and its users tend to use a lot more plugins, including things like ad-blockers that scan over each webpage and can be beneficial (battery-wise) or not depending on content. Safari users are more of a barefoot type. A power user is more likely to not be running Safari. And a power user may, well, prefer to sacrifice battery power to get the power they seek.

Besides, there's some precedent set in 1998 by a certain OS that "favored" their embedded browser over the competition, so I doubt Apple would want to tickle that fancy.

I would be at least slightly surprised if Apple would deliberately hold back power-saving techniques from third party developers. It’s not like this is something that makes Safari much more appealing to users. Most users wouldn’t even notice that their choice to use Safari is responsible for their great battery life.

Third party developers are free to go here and see what Apple is doing:

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit

> Most users wouldn’t even notice that their choice to use Safari is responsible for their great battery life.

Seeing that MacOS has called out which apps are using the most energy for years, users can definitely tell which apps are using the most battery life.

Apple can and does leave things out of that repo.

So you think there is a conspiracy by Apple to not allow third parties to be battery efficient and make there hardware look bad?

But you are free to download the source code, compile and run it yourself to see if it is less battery efficient than the official builds.

I did not say that.

I absolutely think there is a conspiracy (inasmuch as "conspiracy" can be defined as "not going out of their way to change it") to make the competitors to Apple applications look worse than their own offerings. It does not reflect poorly on Apple when Firefox performs worse and uses more memory and battery than Safari.

How is Apple suppose to change Firefox and Chrome’s source code?

If either browser’s manufacturer wants to see what Apple does to make Safari more battery efficient, they are free to look at the source code to WebKit.

And as the other person told you already, Safari.app is not what you get if you build the WebKit source. In much the same way that you can't judge Chrome by Chromium, one is the base of the other, not the whole.

If only the underlying engine were open source so people could see what “secret APIs” (sic) it was using…

It’s mostly that they care. Chrome is designed with the mindset that it’s the most important thing running on your computer.

If I had to guess, it's that Apple refuses to implement very CPU-heavy JS features they don't think add much value in Safari.

I recall some feature I was using that ran in an inferior way to save power on Safari, so much so that I had to kill that feature and use a different API

I think it's more that Apple implements power saving behavior into the JS engine on desktop much like they do on mobile. For example, pausing background scripts on inactive tabs and disallowing autoplay on videos even on desktop.

I’ve not noticed a difference between safari and brave, so I’d say the former is not blessed.

It's because of the quality of Chrome. Google's focus is on features and security, with efficiency secondary. Safari's primary focus is efficiency.

Google's only incentive to make Chrome more efficient is when they start receiving heat (no pun intended) about bad performance.

Googles focus is to collect as much data about the user as possible, nothing else.