I am thinking about making Chrome my default browser. Has Google made it more efficient, and does it perform better on M1 with less
Battery drain than before? Want some information before I commit. Thx
Use Brave instead. No issues on M1 and full Chromium browse functionality incl. extensions. Chrome on any platform will come with the advertising and tracking overhead that is Google. Start with default Brave and slowly work your way through the settings locking things down so you have a comfortable browsing experience. I have no issues with it slowing my machine or my browsing experience down
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Same here. Brave plus a tab manager if you’re a compulsive tab hoarder. 
Brave’s default privacy stuff works better for me at blocking weird popups and such than any browser extensions I’ve seen.
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Personally I try to stay away from anything Google – not because of battery drain, but because of company ethos – but I’ll be curious to see what others say. The closest I come to using Chrome is that I rely on some electron apps, regrettably.
Right now with the same tabs open in both Safari and Chrome I have 2.35 GB of memory used in Safari and 1.5 in Chrome. I realize this means, almost, nothing. If we all did measurements though it could be meaningful. Haha.
I have a desktop and don’t notice Chrome taking up power. But then again, I don’t keep track with much concern.
well if it makes you feel better Electron apps are more Microsoft than Google if you want to assign ownership to an open source product!
I have not noticed the old memory/power issues with Chrome in recent past. I think they have gotten a pretty good hold on that. I stick with Safari on desktop because I do so much work on iPad Pro and like how they work together.
Not bad. I probably have 40 tabs open in Brave, most of them using 30-40 MB, a few with more like 200 or 300 MB. 16GB M1 MBA running Brave, Mail, some Numbers sheets, a couple Excel docs, and other misc. stuff. Total RAM usage is about 11GB, not counting cached files.
I’d love to hear more — I don’t know much about this at all, besides the commonly held wisdom that electron apps essentially include the chrome browser and that’s one of the reason why even basic apps written in electron take up so much disk space and ram. So that’s why I was saying that using them comes close to using chrome itself. Is that inaccurate/no longer the case?
The tech is actually maintained by GitHub which MSFT bought. It is pretty much the rest though as you said though, and Microsoft Edge also runs on Chromium.
It’s worth distinguishing between Chromium and Chrome. Chrome is Google’s browser. Chromium is the open source flavor. So some of the concerns (privacy, etc.) with browsers like Chrome may not be present in the open source version.
Chromium is the open source flavor that Google still pretty much controls…. You would not argue AOSP (andorid open source project) is not google would you? Google has been pretty good steward of it, but still Google.
FWIW new duck duck go browser is built on webkit.
Been using Workona as a tab manager. Pretty slick on Brave and with the ios apps.
Great info! any ideas if RAM usage increase if you have PWA’s as opposed to site just being open as tabs?
I would intuitively assume that PWAs and sites siloed via apps like Coherence and Unite would use more RAM than just having tabs open, largely because all the overhead of the browser itself has to be loaded for each one. That would add up over time.
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