I found this title misleading. I thought this would be an article about how much power is consumed by the browsers of visitors to popular sites, e.g. the energy footprint of one day of Reddit's users based on the length of time of the average daily visit and how much battery each of the major browsers consumes in that time or something.
What it's actually about is how much power is consumed by different browsers using popular websites on one machine. That isn't actually as interesting as I'd hoped.
Browsers can influence the power usage of a computer but just having the thing on all day is a significant base load that needs to be met. Compared to that the websites that you visit likely have relatively little effect as long as the pages don't contain javascript that keeps on running, video or animated content.
How much difference there is between browsers then becomes a function of the different base-loads for the various OS's + the base load of using the browser in the first place + the efficiency of the rendering engine when rendering the pages under test.
Finding the power usage of the browser alone is going to be very difficult since you can't really run a browser without an OS and the various bits and pieces of hardware in the laptop which are not necessarily direclty related to running the browser.
Really? I think it's well known that Chrome isn't nearly as efficient as Safari but I'm amazed just how big the difference between some websites is. Some sites are worse on all browsers, but I wasn't expecting the effect to be by hours.
So you look a site like Mashable and with Safari you're getting 1/3 the battery life of Cult of Mac. That's crazy.
But then on a few sites things are really nuts. What is going on with Forbes where Chrome's battery life is 50% what Firefox and Safari get? Something is going on there.
What it's actually about is how much power is consumed by different browsers using popular websites on one machine. That isn't actually as interesting as I'd hoped.