Chrome is HOT


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So, running the latest 64bit Chrome in OSX El Capitan and watching some YouTube video, I can see the general temperature of my iMac rising from 35C to easy 56-60C.

Playing the same video with Safari, the reading fall off to 42-44C....  

What does Chrome do to get the iMac so HOT?

 

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So, running the latest 64bit Chrome in OSX El Capitan and watching some YouTube video, I can see the general temperature of my iMac rising from 35C to easy 56-60C.

Playing the same video with Safari, the reading fall off to 42-44C....  

What does Chrome do to get the iMac so HOT?

 

Hardware acceleration. It warms up Windows too.

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Chrome keeps the CPU from entering brief periods of sleep mode. it keeps Chrome more responsive, but at a cost of energy usage. On an iMac, you notice it as heat; on a mobile, as reduced battery life.

Seriously, Chrome sucks. I would recommend Edge before recommending Chrome.

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Tried the same test with FireFox and I have the same reading as with Safari...  FireFox run cooler than Chrome and the video plays without any problem/skipping.

I guess it's time to switch to FireFox...

 

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So, running the latest 64bit Chrome in OSX El Capitan and watching some YouTube video, I can see the general temperature of my iMac rising from 35C to easy 56-60C.

Playing the same video with Safari, the reading fall off to 42-44C....  

What does Chrome do to get the iMac so HOT?

 

As much as I love Chrome, it is a memory/cpu/battery hog. It has advanced to the point of it being close to a complete OS. It can do a lot of really nice things like full hardware graphics acceleration.Try running Google maps in Chrome and then in Edge. It works great and looks nice in Edge, but if you run it in chrome, your GPU plays along and there's a lot more visual coolness going on. It feels like an actual desktop application instead of a really cool web-app. That's just one example. Especially Google's own services (obviously) benefit from using Chrome.

But yeah, I have 17 tabs open at the moment and Chrome is running no less than 41 (!) background processes, eating up close to 1.8GB of RAM. There's tons of stuff running in the background and everything gets thrown into your RAM, which makes things really fast, but also requires a bunch of power. That's okay when I'm on my fast desktop PC with 16GB of ram, but on a laptop it's problematic because it notably affects battery life. Chrome eats a lot more battery than Edge or IE on Windows, too. I disable it running in the background on my laptop and only open it up when I really need it. 

With all that said, it's still my favorite browser. Edge is the next one, but who knows how good that's going to be. Chrome is on version 46.0 and Edge still feels very much like 1.0.

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Try running Google maps in Chrome and then in Edge. It works great and looks nice in Edge, but if you run it in chrome, your GPU plays along and there's a lot more visual coolness going on.

That's because Chrome uses special, if not closed, API's to talk with most Google services, and doesn't always just use HTML5.  Any comparison to the way Google Earth works in any other browser is completely worthless unless that browser has a plugin for Google Earth, and even then that presumes the plugin is as up to date as the API's Chrome is using when communicating with it.

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That's because Chrome uses special, if not closed, API's to talk with most Google services, and doesn't always just use HTML5.  Any comparison to the way Google Earth works in any other browser is completely worthless unless that browser has a plugin for Google Earth, and even then that presumes the plugin is as up to date as the API's Chrome is using when communicating with it.

 

I know all that. What's your point exactly? 

I don't care how they do it. The end-result is that the end-user experience is different. 

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Safari was and likely remains more efficient than Chrome, but since Chrome 46 I haven't noticed a significant lessening of battery life versus Safari. My battery meter on my MBA shows about ~5 W drain, sometimes lower, when browsing on battery with Chrome. That's about the same for Safari. Now for UI responsiveness, Safari especially on El Cap is far ahead - even scrolling, although scrolling in both browsers in OS X is a far smoother experience than on my Windows desktop.

All that being said, the one site that does drive the fans in my MBA nuts is using Google Hangouts. Just a simple video feed but that used to send the fans to overdrive in Chrome, and that's considering almost 95% of the time the laptop is dead silent and the bottom of the laptop is nice and cool.

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So, running the latest 64bit Chrome in OSX El Capitan and watching some YouTube video, I can see the general temperature of my iMac rising from 35C to easy 56-60C.

Playing the same video with Safari, the reading fall off to 42-44C....  

What does Chrome do to get the iMac so HOT?

 

Try this: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihdccplidncghkekgioiakgal?hl=en-US

I think I can explain the difference you're seeing (on youtube).

Youtube serves vp9 encoded videos whenever possible. VP9 is a higher quality/newer codec but is not hardware accelerated on most hardware and can for this reason cause more heat/more battery draw when decoding, compared to h.264 which is hardware accelerated and decoded on the gpu in most cases.

Safari does not support vp8/9, so will always be served h.264 on youtube. The above extension will force youtube to serve h.264 to chrome.

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