Battery Box ran the numbers comparing Chrome to Safari on their MacBooks and found using Safari adds over an hour to your battery life. We had the same experience in my house when my wife was having trouble with her 13″ MacBook Pro’s battery. I switched her to Safari and the problems went away. (In fairness, she also stopped using Flash.) I know that Chrome has some whizzy features that aren’t in Safari, but the increased battery life plus the deep iCloud integration make Safari my browser of choice.
Clearly, preserving battery life on all of its devices is a high priority for Apple. I’d venture to say that because Apple is the hardware vendor, preserving battery life always will be higher on Apple’s list than Google’s. (via Daring Fireball.)