Chrome and battery life

What actions can i take to improve battery life using Chrome on my 15" MB Pro (late 2011) on Lion?

Believe it or not, it's probably Flash.

Check out Activity Monitor while Chrome is open. Adobe Flash is probably 30%CPU ALL THE TIME.

I had a similar thread when I first started using Chrome.

Try using GfxCardStatus. Occasionally, Chrome will kick on the discrete graphics chip in your MBP, which definitely consumes a lot more power. This will help you to enforce the integrated graphics instead.

ajaxwoolley said:

What actions can i take to improve battery life using Chrome on my 15" MB Pro (late 2011) on Lion?

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Is the battery life significantly worse than when using Safari or Firefox?

Thanks for the suggestions @MAcsWork and @cwa107. I'll look onto it.

@Zoolook I haven't done a well controlled comparison yet. I use Google Apps on Chrome for work from home office and so have never had to question the power consumption. I might have firefox or safari open at the same time for "personal" surfing from time to time, or just another chrome window. Had a MB Air 11" for desktop on the go.

Recently I consolidated my operations into my new favorite non-living object, my 15" MB Pro (Processor 2.2 GHz Intel Core i7, Memory 8 GB 1333 MHz DDR3, Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6750M 512 MB), and I have been slightly disappointed in the amount of "away from the power cable" time I'm getting.

I use a couple other power/graphics intensive apps (Parallels 7 Running quickbooks premier, Sketchup Pro 8), but no video editing, gaming, or other graphics-intensive applications. I suspend the virtual machine in Parallels before sleeping, close smaller apps I'm not using for a while, etc... But I seem to only get about 3-3.5 hours of working time, net.

So my question came not so much from having a sense of browser comparison, more so from initial troubleshooting about how to configure my settings to get the most mobility.

For comparison, I have the 2GHz Core i7 with the lower end AMD GPU. With GfxCardStatus forcing integrated graphics and running just Chrome, Mail and TotalFinder, I generally get about 6-6.5 hours.

With Safari in place of Chrome, I'll get more like 7 hours of runtime.

That's in my "low power" mode. Start to introduce other applications - particularly VMWare Fusion, iTunes, the Mac App Store or anything that has regular communication with the Internet, and it will drop pretty dramatically.

Both Chrome and Firefox will force the discrete GFX by default, lowering battery life considerably.

I noticed a bug in GfxcardStatus where if you have power switching enabled (which forces integrated use on battery power), it only works if you boot up into batter power, or disconnect from the mains while the machine is awake. If you disconnect in sleep mode, then wake it, it will continue to use the discrete chip.

Aside from that, it's a great tool for forcing switching based on power supply.

All very helpful feedback, thanks. I almost never need flash, so easy enough to disable the plugin until I need it. I'll run the GfxcardStatus as well, with the advance knowledge of the aforementioned "bug".