Safari gets energy-efficient update in Mavericks
When OS X Mavericks arrives later this year, a new version of Safari will come along for the ride. Apple’s latest Web browser boasts smoother scrolling, a new Top Sites implementation, and several under-the-hood improvements.
These changes help deliver the improvement that Apple senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi stressed the most during Monday’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote—how energy efficient Safari will be in its latest iteration. OS X Mavericks introduces a new power-saving feature called App Nap, which decides where your Mac should direct its power supply. When Safari isn’t your primary program, App Nap will essentially put it to sleep, greatly reduces your Mac’s power usage.
To demonstrate how this works, Federighi showed off an energy-intensive web page with lots of animation alongside a CPU-usage graph. When Safari was the in use, the graph’s power-usage shot up. But when Federighi switched over to iTunes, the power went way down. This feature will be especially helpful in preserving the battery life of MacBooks with Retina display, according to Federighi.
Compared to current versions of Chrome and Firefox, Apple contends Safari is lightning fast. SunSpider’s metrics clock Safari’s speeds as 1.44 times faster than Chrome; JSBench logs Safari at 3.8x against Chrome’s 1.5x. (And according to Federighi, looking at Firefox’s numbers is “just sad” by comparison.)
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