This pseudo-truth just bugs me.
I hear it all the the time. People saying they choose Safari as a browser because it’s better for their battery. But there isn’t any data (that I know of) that proves that Safari is more efficient at battery usage than any other browser.
I applaud Matt Birchler who did real testing on this (2024). He scripted a 20 minute loop that watched YouTube videos, scrolled Mastodon, scrolled websites, and typed in Google Docs. He ran it in Chrome vs Safari for 3 hours each 6 times. The data actually showed Chrome was a little bit better.
You can choose Safari because you like how it feels, or it’s support of certain features, or heck even because it’s the default browser on Apple stuff and sometimes it feels good to just go with the grain. But the battery life argument just doesn’t hold water.
Maybe it did at one time!
Remember when we used to care about CSS selector performance, then people like Steve Souders, Nicole Sullivan, Ben Frain, Harry Roberts, etc did testing and proved it mostly just doesn’t matter?
Remember when inline CSS was always bad, then it turned out to become a recommended performance enhancement sometimes?
Remember when we all put scripts at the bottom of the <body>, then we got the defer attribute and it turns out its often better to leave them in the head now?
Remember when FOUT as bad (layout shift!) then it was good again (users don’t like seeing nothing!)?
Sometimes we gotta just update our thinking. I’m sure I’ve got loads of outdates factoids in my head that need a reboot.