The heaviest parts of the test were using Google sites. Google has been caught in the past letting their sites run worse on Safari than Chrome. I'd really like to see this test done without having a single Google property be involved.
Agree with this. As soon as it became apparent a large proportion of battery usage would be dominated by the YouTube activity, I became suspicious. It's not just Safari where we've seen Google playing dirty tricks either. Back in 2018 it was this:
> YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome
Of course Google is using their own browser to showcase whatever new shit they have developed, or they expand Chrome when one of their properties needs some sort of new feature. It's been quite a while that there was innovation in the browser scene from anyone but Chrome... to the contrary, over the last years a lot either gave up entirely or went under Chromium. Including Microsoft.
>> YouTube accounted for 8.5% of total TV viewing in May, while Netflix was a close second at 7.9%.
Assuming that's true, I still don't think it matters that much.
I expect that a very large proportion of Netflix that's watched is watched on a smart TV. Much larger than the proportion of Youtube that's watched on a TV.
Interesting! Almost all my video watching is on a roku box attached to my TV. I may watch a tiny bit more Youtube than Netflix on my PC or phone, just because people send me links that way, but if the videos they link me are more than a minute or two, usually I'm saving them to "watch later" and catching them on the TV box.
I'd have assumed most people's proportions were similar and that therefore the proportions for the two services were similar; that is to say, for people who use both kinds of devices to watch video, I wouldn't have expected a big difference based on the specific service.
Do you have a source that suggests that people who use both kinds of devices watch a larger proportion of Netflix on the TV but a larger proportion of Youtube on PC?
This article isn't about streaming activity in general, it's about the Nielsen ratings, which as far as I can tell wouldn't include views on creators like MrBeast, just proper 'television'.
A follow-up test to investigate whether Google sites are more power-hungry than similar non-Google sites does not have to be representative of general web browsing patterns, because the original test already addressed that question.
I know many people do watch YouTube videos but indeed, when a link leads to a YouTube video I don't follow it (and nobody ever just sends me links to YouTube).
I do turn to YouTube if I need some kind of visual guide, like for auto repair sometimes, but it's rare.
Most links to YouTube videos I find are excruciatingly slow explanations of something that could be done in two paragraphs and one screenshot, or some kind of meme that I don't find funny.
> I do turn to YouTube if I need some kind of visual guide, like for auto repair sometimes, but it's rare.
My current car has a particular enthusiast that has a personal site with detailed text-with-photographs guides to most of the common repairs, and it's awesome.
When I buy my next car I'll probably buy a repair manual to go with it.
I normally look for text alternatives, to be honest. It's not necessarily a bias against YouTube, but more video-based content in general. If I can't find an alternative I'll skim it with subtitles on. I certainly wouldn't have it open for one and half hours in a 3 hour period though!
If a friend sends me a link to youtube, i might click on it to see what the video is, and then close it without watching it. This doesn't happen very often though. If someone gives me a timestamped link and tells me to watch 30s at that spot i'll humor them, but that's about my limit.
That perfectly describes my behaviour. I don't care for video content. (I similarly don't open tiktok or instagram reel links.)
For a few things I've found where youtube has some specific content I'm interested in, I'll use yt-dlp to download and archive it to watch outside of youtube.com.
I simply cannot remember the last time I watched 90 minutes of YouTube in a 3 hour period. I don't think that activity is representative of typical usage at all!
If I look online for stats relating to use of the YouTube app in the UK, it's 20 hours a month. If that's distributed equally across the month, that's definitely not 1.5 hours in any one sitting.
"YouTube", like "Twitter", has never been one thing, one culture. There's a zillion long tail creators making all kinds of unmonetized stuff because they want to.
> Google has been caught in the past letting their sites run worse on Safari than Chrome
Is that... actually true? Or is this just a way of spinning something like "gsheets used a chrome-only extension before it was standardized". Has there been coverage of divergent power draw between chrome and other browsers on google sites?
It's pure apologism. The only thing Google has been shown to do is not test on browsers that have lower market share (which I personally don't like as a mobile Firefox user) or to have fewer features on browsers that don't support all the APIs, which would presumably result in longer battery life.
