Flotato – lightweight non-electron webapps as apps on macOS (flotato.com) 3 points by jbverschoor on July 3, 2019 past Flotato – Break Free from the Browser ( flotato.com ). To be light-weight, Flotato doesn't just run a stripped down, Safari-backed web view, it also defaults to the mobile version if one is available. Here's Flotato compared to a regular session in Safari. Note the slightly lower CPU usage.

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Is it bad?

When I saw the results I got suspicious. Chrome was using way more memory than I thought it would. Maybe it was the virtual machine blocking Chrome's direct access to my Macbook's* GPU? I decided to run the next test, the one with 54 tabs directly on my own Big Sur installation. The results were, well, slightly worse.

The graphs don't tell the full story

But it's probably not as bad as it looks. It's not a terrible thing that an app actually uses your computer. And you've got to hand it to Chrome: it is fast!

I'm sure Chrome is going out of its way to manage its memory usage across tabs, keeping the current tab fast and responsive. That's great if you're not running any other macOS apps than Chrome, effectively using Chrome as your operating system, and macOS as a kind of bootloader.

But when you're using Sketch, Final Cut, Photoshop next to Chrome, that seems to be a problem. MacOS likely tries to tell Chrome to take it easy, and Chrome likely does take it easy. These graphs don't tell that story.

So no, it's most likely not as bad as it looks, but that doesn't change the fact since switching to Safari, I almost forgot what my fan sounds like.

And then there's this chart. As we can see, the two browsers heat up the computer almost to the exact same level - Safari even getting slightly warmer. This probably points to psutil not being able to see all Safari's child processes, but only the main ones — despite the fact that Activity Monitor is able to group them. That's a little confusing.

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* Macbook 16' from 2019 with2.4 GHz, 8-Core Intel Core i9 with 32 GB 2667 MHz DDR4 RAM and an AMD Radeon Pro 5500M 8GB GPU

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