Large energy consumption on macOS when playing videos

[yannisv]

Hi all. I would like to start by saying I love Vivaldi and its features. This is the second time I am trying to make it my main and only browser, but unfortunately, I ran into the same issue that made me quit.

When playing videos (e.g. YouTube) my 2017 13" MacBook Pro (i5 2.3 GHz, Intel Iris Plus 640) gets very hot, the fans start spinning, and my battery is drained fast. I have tried in incognito mode and with a fresh install. It is not a recent update either, this was also happening 4 months ago, when I again tried to switch over to Vivaldi.

As a test, I compared Vivaldi with my other browsers. I loaded the same YouTube video and played it while logging energy consumption. You can see in the results that Vivaldi is just draining the battery. Firefox, Edge and Safari are almost identical. The spikes you see in between are caused by me launching the browser to load the url.

I would really love to have Vivaldi as my daily browser, but unfortunately I cannot while this problem persists.

[Chas4]

The video codec each browser gets may not be the same on YouTube, if you right on a video and click stats for nerds it will list the codec used amount other things. Also is the resolution the same in each browser?

[yannisv]

@chas4 The resolution is the same, yes.
Codec shows as vp09/opus at the moment, but I have also tried installing https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/h264ify/aleakchihdccplidncghkekgioiakgal?hl=en to force h264 without any change in energy consumption.

[Chas4]

Not sure if the updated chromium will help with the energy usage https://vivaldi.com/blog/desktop/minor-update-3-for-desktop-browser-4-1/ (this is also a security update)