Right off the bat, the winners are Chrome and MPlayer OSX Extended. Why?
VLC uses roughly 10% of my quad core Core i7 (Sandybridge MBP 15″) when idling. That’s unacceptable, especially when I’m running off battery. MPlayer uses nothing. A bonus is that the MPlayer interface is much slicker than VLC’s, and I’ve always preferred MPlayer on KDE over VLC but for some reason I didn’t think it existed for the Mac (because when I did a search the first thing google gave me was some old school, last developed in 2005, version). It’s also much easier to open multiple instances of MPlayer, and the hotkey combos are way better. (Try arrows for 10sec seek in MPlayer vs cmd + alt + arrows on VLC.)
Chrome and Firefox are similar. Firefox cpu usage idling (on a blank page) can fluctuate from 4-9%. It’s small but it’s unacceptable when every other browser I’ve tried (Safari, Chrome and Opera) fluctuate from nothing to 1%. There are some other niceties about Chrome I won’t get into except a new one: It allows you to do voice searches where Firefox doesn’t. (Open google.com in English in Chrome and a little mic will appear in the search box. Click it, speak, it shows up in the search box. I agree: not a big deal.)
There are other considerations that led me to these two winners, but they’re likely very particular to my tastes, so I won’t bother mentioning them.
