chrome energy consumption

Here is what solved it for me (2013 retina): in Chrome, go to Settings > System, then toggle off "Use graphics acceleration when available". did not see any difference on websites. Just the macbook does not heat up anymore and finds some restful sleep when closed.

Make sure to quit the browser & relaunch the browser as that can help to improve things as well in the short term. Even rebooting the whole computer may help (best to uncheck "Open windows when logging in" when the pop-up appears when restarting/shutting down the Mac).

I've seen issues with Chromium base browsers where the browser profile has an issue. Maybe it is some of the data storage associated with a browser profile. I have found deleting some of the browser's data has helped with performance and CPU/energy utilization. I don't use Google Chrome, so I'm not sure what options it provides with deleting some of the browser data. With Vivaldi I will delete the "cache" & "application cache", but after a while this is not enough and I need to delete the "Storage (including Extension storage)" which has provided a tremendous improvement (I don't use any browser extensions). These are all options within the Vivaldi browser, maybe see if you have similar options in Chrome.

There is a way to launch browsers with a default profile, but not sure how that is done on macOS (most likely involves the command line, check the Chrome documentation). I've only done so a couple of time on my Linux system. Probably the simplest way for most users would be to create a new macOS user account in macOS. Log out of your main user account & log into the new macOS user account to see how Chrome behaves there....you get a new browser profile automatically and should avoid any browser extensions being utilized in your main account.

16GB is a reasonably configured system, and an M2 is a fast CPU.

This can be one of several things, none of which are Apple hardware:

• The browser has a bug. This is the browser vendors responsibility.
• You have installed a 3rd party browser plug-in that is misbehaving. This is the plug-in vendor's responsibility.
• There is 1 or more websites you have loaded into a browser tab that misbehaves. Just about every webpage has JavaScript that runs on your Mac. The JavaScript is not always well written. That is the web page's creators responsibility. And in a few rare cases the web page is malicious and is using JavaScript to do work for the malicious website using your CPU, Memory, Storage, and network bandwidth (this tends to be rare).

While you may or may not have changed anything in 2 years, the web has not stood still. So the web pages you visit keep evolving. Maybe not all of them, but if you keep 60+tabs open, then statistically every month or so, at least one of them is going to change.

Chrome automatically installs updates. Firefox has most likely asked you to install updates. If you have been running 3rd party browser plug-ins, they would have asked you to install updates. And in 2 years, Apple will have asked you to install software updates for some Apple apps, and macOS itself.

In 2 years, things have changed, and if you never saw this before, then some change in 2 years has precipitated this behavior.

My personal experience is that Safari is the most energy efficient web browser on the Mac. Then again, I am only comparing to Firefox and Chrome. There are other browsers, and some may be even more efficient.

But even an efficient browser, that accesses a poorly written webpage can suffer.

ansh73 wrote:

Does this mean the mac has a hardware issue? I am facing the same issue on my mac, but it only happens with firefox and chrome.

No. It means the browsers you mentioned are resource hogs vs Safari.

This can just be the browser, or the number of tabs opened, or the JavaScript running in those tabs, or the plugins/extensions you have added to those browsers.

But no, it is not a hardware issue, except if maybe you have an under configured RAM based Mac, and the resources the 2 browsers are using happen to need lots of RAM. And that is not bad hardware, just under configured.

ansh73 wrote:

My mac is a 14 inch base m2 with 16gb of ram, and sometimes chrome uses 13 gb of it. But during those times energy consumption is low. its like this problem happens once in a while. but it happens randsomly. When I have 60+tabs open, it only 200-500 in activity monitor, but sometimes, once in a while, it starts with 5000 in activity monitor, and thats what it shows in the 12 hour section, with only 2 tabs open. So what does this mean. Again, it only happens with google chrome, and firefox.

60+ tabs is a lot. You will be consuming a lot of system memory even if background tabs are hibernated.

Certain web pages will cause a problem. All it takes is just one troublesome web page to cause a problem especially when you have 60+ tabs open at once.

See my earlier post in this thread for things which can help you in this regard. However, the best thing you can do is try to find a better way of using your browser so you don't always have 60+ tabs open all the time. Two options you may want to consider:

Use a "Save All Tabs as Session ...." to save all the open tabs in a particular browser window. Then close that browser window to save memory & cpu cycles. When you need to access those tabs again, just re-open the saved session. This is a good option if you don't need to re-open to the last saved state each time. Otherwise look at the next option.

Use browser profiles to manage your browser use. You can load the last saved browser session associated with that particular profile so you should be resuming with all the same tabs open again. Log out of a profile when you are finished with it. Then launch a different profile for your next "job".

I use the Vivaldi browser which is based on Chromium. These features are included in Vivaldi. I don't know if Chromium & Google Chrome have them or not, or any other Chromium based browsers.

While the following Vivaldi article is thinking of profiles as different users, they can just as easily be used for different tasks instead.

https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tools/user-profiles/

https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-at-work-and-at-home/

Here is a Vivaldi article about using Sessions:

https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/session-management/

This article actually mentions you can have Vivaldi autosave your sessions once every hour and keep X days of sessions:

https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/panels/sessions-panel/

Unfortunately, that is what Chrome is known for. Try using a different browser when the task doesn’t require features that are specific to Chrome.

My mac is a 14 inch base m2 with 16gb of ram, and sometimes chrome uses 13 gb of it. But during those times energy consumption is low. its like this problem happens once in a while. but it happens randsomly. When I have 60+tabs open, it only 200-500 in activity monitor, but sometimes, once in a while, it starts with 5000 in activity monitor, and thats what it shows in the 12 hour section, with only 2 tabs open. So what does this mean. Again, it only happens with google chrome, and firefox. it does not happen when i game on the mac, or use any other apps. Apple did a hardware service diagnostics thrice, and that reported no issues. But is that hardware service diagnostic accurate? Does it report false results? because this problem with chrome and firefox was not happening during the first 5 months of ownership, but randomly started 2 months ago. I tried software+firemware reinstall, but that did not help much and reinstalled chrome and their were no extensions, and also tried browser profile switching. It only happens with chrome and firefox. Please give me your advice on how to approach this.

As noted, Chrome uses more resources than most other browsers.

Does this mean the mac has a hardware issue? I am facing the same issue on my mac, but it only happens with firefox and chrome.