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At least a few times a day I get disturbed by high Chrome CPU usage... I have to open Chrome's Task Manager and see which tab is taking up CPU.

For example https://www.ethereum.org/ always takes 20-30% CPU.

Today I had the same happen on a TechCrunch url.

Could it be some extension? I just checked https://www.ethereum.org/ in Incognito tab with almost no extensions and it was the same - high CPU load (30%!)

I'm seriously considering swithcing to Safari because of this and some other issues with Chrome recently :/

Any comments / solutions to this?

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2 Answers 2

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Safari 7 is documented in many Mavericks reviews to be better at extending battery life and CPU usage. That ethereal link has an animation in the background, I'm assuming that's what's using your CPU.

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  • Thank you but the animation in the background is a simple .mp4 file ... and when opened in Safari it doesn't use CPU "at all". So that's not the reason... and as I said some random sites cause the spike and they don't have any animations (videos).
    – davidhq
    Aug 17, 2014 at 0:01
  • I'd still much rather use Chrome than Safari because of extensions and in general I like the UI and features better... I was postponing a switch to Safari hoping that various issues would go away and now I started wondering if they will or I should switch and check back in a year.
    – davidhq
    Aug 17, 2014 at 0:07
  • Well without knowing what the sites are, it's a little hard for us to help you. You said you did it in Chrome "almost" without extensions. Have you done it with no extensions at all? For another thing--Safari's handling of the same .mp4 is not necessarily relevant. Who knows how Google is rendering it?
    – samh
    Aug 18, 2014 at 21:10
  • OK a little more work on my part (why I don't know). Using Chrome's inspector I removed the background video and CPU usage dropped considerably although still higher than expected. Deleting the two radial countdown timers also improved CPU usage a lot. So I don't know what to tell you except that when energy efficiency matters, use Safari, especially when animation or video are involved.
    – samh
    Aug 18, 2014 at 21:16
  • Thank you for that insight... I didn't remember to test it by removing the video from the DOM. Looks like this could be really more efficient in Chrome... I will look for similar elements next time it happens on some page.
    – davidhq
    Aug 20, 2014 at 11:14
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You better uninstall Chrome: sloppy programming and not very safe. If you want some other browser than Safari, use Firefox or Opera. You can also uninstall the Google Updater (which is secretly installed at the same time): read here how to do that http://raamdev.com/2008/howto-remove-google-software-update-on-mac-os-x/ this also works in Mavericks.

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