Does Chrome Burn Through More Power Than Firefox?

Next up is Peacekeeper, which is the web browser benchmark developed by Futuremark. Unlike SunSpider, Peacekeeper stresses more areas of the web-browser than solely JavaScript.

When looking at the average power consumption results, Mozilla Firefox 5.0 continues going through more battery power than Mozilla Firefox 4.0. The average power consumption increase for Firefox 5 on the Peacekeeper benchmark is a 6.3% increase over Firefox 4. Google's Chrome 13 power consumption is about 4% higher than Firefox 4, but still obviously under that of Firefox 5. Chrome 14 when stable should be even better thanks to the fix in the aforementioned bug report. Firefox 6 development builds were not tested, so it's not known whether the Firefox 5 power regression is fixed at this time.

Firefox 4 had a slightly lower average CPU power consumption than Firefox 5 and Chrome 13, but it was only a difference of 2%, which isn't a big deal for an un-stressed Intel Core i5 "Sandy Bridge" system.

For those interested in the actual benchmark results, with Peacekeeper the Firefox 4 browser had a score of 5724, Firefox 5 came in at 6244, and Chrome 13 easily won with a score of 13762.