While I don't think you're wrong, that's just .. dumb. They're both Google's products. You would think they would put some thought into that.

This is part of why I stopped using Chrome, it encourages a closed ecosystem where technology is only advancing if you use Google Everything.

I have a 2012 MacBook Pro. Very little use. Never even got warm. I downloaded google chrome browser the other day, and it gets hot, fan goes on high, wheel spins like regret. I can't blame it on google chrome. My memory, and cpu aren't using a worrisome amount of resources?

I am wondering why Google chrome would cause this problem--if that's the problem? From a programmer's perspective?

(I did turn off Apple automatic update, and install.)

This seems highly doubtful. They are both Google's code - one is just packaged as a plugin rather than built into Chrome.

It's possible that they are using different video codecs. On Safari H264 and on Chrome VP9 but with only H264 being hardware accelerated.

This is just a total guess of course (and I'd have thought it would depend on what the other end of the chat supports as well), but I bring it up since people have recently been complaining about YouTube in Chrome using far more CPU than YouTube in Safari, because YouTube uses VP9 in Chrome. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9330357

On the other hand it's possible that it's just the general suckiness of Chrome video performance, even when using H264 it seems to use over twice as much power as Safari: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806976

Well, Hangouts on Safari is a Google plugin. I believe it generally uses VP8. Hardware doesn't matter, as what's needed is an encoder - and hardware encoders usually aren't good enough to use for real time chat. Encoding video for any format well is going to be costly, hence the original article mentions complains about Skype as well.

Browser-specific performance quirks has been the name of the game since forever.

I guarantee it doesn't. Hangouts in Safari will peg my CPU near the thermal limit for the duration of the call.