During the Verge’s testing of the recently released MacBook they found drastic differences in battery life when using Google Chrome instead of Safari. In the test —which cycles through webpages with screen brightness at 65% until the battery dies — the MacBook managed to last 13 hours and 18 minutes while using Safari but only lasted 9 hours and 45 minutes with Chrome. That’s over three and a half  hours difference.

Vlad Savov doesn’t go into the reasons for this large of a discrepancy, aside from his mention of Apple’s ability to optimize Safari better using their advanced knowledge of hardware and operating system changes. But, could this be due to Chrome having Flash built-in and Apple’s decision to remove it from the default OS X installation?