“If you’re a MacBook user,” the company wrote, “you're losing an average of 1 hour of total battery life by using Chrome. Firefox is a little better, but Safari is the clear winner. You’ll want to use Safari if you want to get the most battery out of your laptop.”
Average Battery Life in Chrome, Firefox, and Safari Tests
Source: BatteryBox
BatteryBox sells a device called BatteryBox, a portable battery for Apple's MacBook, iPhone, and iPad. The company's blog follows battery-related issues, and this test didn't involve the company's products.
The company said it conducted the tests using power consumption measuring devices and testing each site for one hour. The data captured from that test was then run through Matlab to extrapolate battery life.
As the world goes mobile, battery life matters more and more. None of the companies or organizations that makes a browser has yet to make battery life a competitive issue, but it's something that some folks do notice.
In fact, BatteryBox's blog post said the company decided to run the tests after the sole Safari user in its office was seen to be getting consistently longer battery life than his compatriots.
“Being the geeks we are,” the blog post said, “it had to be investigated.”
We included the averages chart above, but BatteryBox offered charts breaking down specific functions. Check out the blog post for more details.