Yeah, I think most complaints about Safari come from web developers. I do a fair amount of web dev yet use Safari as my default browser. As a user, it's great. It seems faster and leaner and it's definitely batter for battery life. The one downside is the extension ecosystem isn't as good as Chrome, but Ad Guard works ok (not as good as uBlock Origin, but good enough) and that's really all I need.

It’s shocking that Safari is the only browser that seems to aim specifically for not eating battery and not turning your laptop into an oven. With the ever rising importance of mobile platforms you’d think these things would be a bigger priority at Google and Mozilla, especially since Google has not one but two mobile platforms, but instead the focus seems to be on gee-whiz bells and whistles of questionable value.

Firefox is very good on macOS these days. Very low memory and CPU footprint, great battery life.

I haven't run numbers but it feels similar to Safari in that I can use it pretty much all day without reaching for the charger - that is, unless I'm doing a lot of video confs.

This hasn’t been my experience — for me, Firefox always manages to get into the “Using Significant Energy” list.

Are you sure it's the browser, not extensions? I had some extensions do that. about:performance should help you figure it out.

This is stock Firefox with DNS level blocking of crap.

Weird. I have Firefox with quite a few extensions and probably about 50 tabs open (most are dormant, but still), and it's not showing as an energy hog.

Unless I'm using video conf or other very heavy websites, CPU usage tends to sit between 2 and 5% with an occasional spike.

12 hr Power in activity manager shows 19.50 (Watts, I presume) which is by far the largest in the list but it's also more or less the only app I've used in those hours :D . Activity Monitor itself usually has an energy impact of ~30.