Test Battery Usage of Every Browser on iPhone: The Winning Option Will Surprise You!

With so many web apps replacing legacy apps, you can do almost everything in your mobile browser, and most of us do. But all that convenience comes at a cost, and if you haven't noticed, your phone's battery is suffering.

So we ran the ultimate battery test to see which iPhone browsers really drain your battery and which one lets you scroll the longest.

Why should we bother with this test?

When switching from Android to iPhone, the first thing many people do is install Google Chrome . That makes sense, since they have all their logins and bookmarks saved there. But when a longtime Apple user sees someone using Chrome, they'll say Chrome is a battery killer for iPhones. They'll say, "Just use Safari."

The test results prove it. Chrome uses more battery than Safari. Many people have decided that no third-party browser can beat Apple's browser, so they stop testing and stick with Safari. But there are plenty of other options: Brave , Opera , Edge , Firefox , Safari , and Chrome. The real winner will shock you.

Set up a fair fight

To fairly compare the browsers on iPhone, the author wrote a small JavaScript bookmarklet to keep a page scrolling infinitely. Brave, Opera, and Edge do not allow JavaScript bookmarklets on mobile.

The author even tried syncing the bookmarklet from the desktop version, but Edge still refused to run.

No need to spend hours manually navigating each browser. Just a page that refreshes automatically without any input. YouTube's autoplay feature is exactly what you need for a reproducible battery test.

You just need a playlist to make sure browsers play the same video. Then YouTube will play the same video one after the other - exactly the same for each browser, no data entry required.

Take a playlist of YouTube videos, set it to autoplay, play the first one and let it run. Set a timer for an hour, come back, note the battery percentage, recharge and repeat for the next browser.

Try your best to keep the conditions the same. Each time, for example, use LTE, turn the brightness up to maximum, set the volume to 50% (to know when playback stops), turn off background app refresh, and close everything else. Restart your phone before each run, just to give every browser a fresh state.

This isn't ideal testing conditions, but it's as fair as you can get. Since I've never used the web version of YouTube, Safari doesn't have any cached advantage (though that only matters for the first few seconds).

Result: The browser you didn't expect wins!

Note : I configured my iPhone to stop charging at 90% to optimize battery health. That means all tests started at a true 90%; essentially, 90.9% instead of 90.0%. All results below show the battery dropping after 1 hour, starting from that consistent 90% baseline.

You would have expected one of the Chromium browsers to come in last, but it was Google Chrome. Chrome came in last—not just among all browsers, but even among its Chromium cousins. But what was really shocking was that Firefox beat them all. It even beat Safari in performance on the iPhone.

This is even more interesting when you realize that only Firefox and Safari use their own browser engines. All the other browsers—Brave, Opera, Edge, and Chrome—are just Chromium under different skins. So while we expect Firefox to be different, we don't expect it to outperform Safari. Whatever Mozilla is doing, their browser is winning.

Among the Chromium browsers, Opera drains the least battery, followed by Brave and Edge. Ironically, Google Chrome performs the worst. All of Chrome's sibling browsers are AI browsers and have additional features like built-in chatbots. Yet Chrome still somehow drains the most battery.

Opera even has a built-in VPN and other add-ons, but it still uses less power than Chrome. There's something wrong with Chrome's code, and it's not good for your iPhone's battery.

Here's another way to look at it. Chrome used 28% of the battery in an hour, while Safari used 21%. Divide that over a full charge, and when the Chrome user's phone was dead, the Safari user still had a quarter of the battery left. Firefox had even more — about 30%. If battery is a concern, Chrome isn't even worth considering.

A quick history check: In 2011, Firefox had 32% of the browser market, while Chrome had just 15%. Now, Chrome dominates at a ridiculous 63%, with Firefox trailing at 5%. It's not hard to see why: Chrome comes pre-installed on every Android device, so people stick with it when they switch platforms. Edge is built into Windows, and Safari is a core part of iOS and macOS.

After all these years, Firefox is still the most productive browser on the iPhone. I wonder why Mozilla doesn't advertise this - maybe they don't realize they've beaten Safari on their home turf?

While it's unlikely everyone is ready to give up on Safari, it may be time to give Firefox some more respect. Ultimately, all browsers take you to the same websites, but they don't treat your battery the same way. This test makes it clear: If battery life matters to you, there's a real difference in your choices—even between browsers running on the same engine.

Micah Soto

Update 30 June 2025