The Least Expensive Web Browser.

By “expensive” I mean how much it weighs down the OS when performing its services. In this case, the readings I took were when the browsers were just open, sitting there, and doing nothing in particular.

“Expensive” is the number of threads being managed, the CPU time and so on. All read by just watching Apple’s Activity monitor.

IOW, if your browser is in the background, open but not frontmost, how much is it chewing up of your system resources?

This is a simple, non-scientific sampling. You can expect that your own readings will differ, but that said, I would expect your results to be generally the same, (else why would I bother to mention it?  🙂

Cut to the chase: DuckDuckGo is the lightest, least-expensive, and by a huge margin.

From worst to best, by thread count, my results were:

Opera (22)

Safari (18)

Edge (16)

Chrome (10)

Firefox (8)

DuckDuckGo (1)

(Yeah, I was surprised how well Chrome ranked, but I have it as buttoned-down as possible.)

Just thought I share what I found. YMWV.