H264ify Prevents YouTube From Draining Your Laptop Battery
Chrome / Firefox: YouTube doesn’t work very well in Chrome and Firefox. In fact, as How-To Geek points out, this drains the battery tremendously. You can work around this issue with h264ify extensions.
How-To Geek explains the issue with Google VP8 and VP9 codecs built into Chrome and Firefox for video playback as opposed to H.264 playback, mostly used by Safari, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge: H.264 playback (or decoding ) is hardware accelerated and can take advantage of your graphics processing unit (GPU). This means your computer’s processor doesn’t need to do more work and uses less battery power. But devices that support hardware-accelerated VP8 and VP9 decoding are not as common (if available).
If you want YouTube videos to play more efficiently and not drain your battery, you can either switch to a different browser or use the h264ify extensions to have your browser request H.264 videos from YouTube.
Besides saving battery power, playback should be smoother, especially on notebooks with limited power consumption.
h264ify | Chrome Web Store
h264ify | Firefox add-ons
Why YouTube in Chrome and Firefox is Draining Your Laptop Battery and How to Fix It | How-To Geek