Battery life seems like an afterthought for anything other than Safari (and back when it was Trident-based, MS Edge on Windows), which is kinda weird when one considers how laptops have come to dominate computing.
I wish Mozilla had been able to keep pushing harder with their servo project. IIRC, one of the earliest upsides I remember hearing about to justify creating Rust (in order to build servo) was that the increased safety with regards to concurrency could allow a web renderer to parallelise computation across _underclocked_ cores, thereby setting a new benchmark for battery consumption.
Granted, that was more about mobile devices but it still stuck with me. Effortless and safe concurrency would tip the scales to having hundreds of low power cores instead of a dozen high powered cores. I want that world, esp for mobile devices and laptops.
When I worked on Firefox for Android, we were constantly fighting for the broader Firefox org to take mobile more seriously —- if Gecko excelled on mobile with respect to power consumption, then a lot of that would spill over to desktop platforms “for free.”
Unfortunately nothing had improved by the time I left in 2021.
From my understanding, Chromium/WebKit/V8 and Firefox/Gecko/Spidermonkey are the last (major) contenders in the browser engine space. After Opera switched to WebKit in 2013. And Edge in 2020. I'm sure there are numerous lesser known ones...
* Blink (Google)
* WebKit2 (Apple and some folks, mainly WebKit2Gtk)
* Gecko (Mozilla)
Microsofts Trident is dead, they now use Blink.
Operas Presto is dead, they now use Blink.
KDEs KHTML (the predecessor of WebKit1) is dead.
Google is dominating, pushing through Android, all Googles-Services and Microsoft Edge. A reason to worry because Google controls the Web and the Engine. Furthermore implementing an entire new engine seems an enormous effort. For instance Microsoft only allows usage of Microsoft Teams Web with a webbrowser based upon Blink. So were back in 2002?
WebKit features also WebKit2Gtk (Epiphany) and Qt5-webkit (Otter) with native integration. Both use the native toolkits, which is an advantage! Interaction with the open-source community around WebKit seems rather good and the engine is integrated by others. Gecko seems not to be integrated by others but by forks only? You remember when Chrome was considered slick and fast? Originally Chrome used the native toolkit on every platform. Now Chrome ships an own toolkit, similar to Firefox.
Google forked from WebKit in 2013, at this point there might be huge differences between WebKit and blink. Someone more knowledgeable might add something to this.
