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IE8 Beats Other Browsers In Laptop Battery Life
WARM3CH writes "AnandTech tested a laptop with an AMD CPU, a laptop with an Intel CPU, and a netbook to compare battery life while running Internet Explorer 8, Opera 10, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome. They tested on simple web pages and flash-infested ones. IE8 had the best battery life on both laptops (followed by FF + AdBlock), and Safari had the worst battery life. On the netbook, Chrome was slightly ahead of IE8. The report concludes: 'Overall, Internet Explorer and Firefox + AdBlock consistently place near the top, with Chrome following closely behind. Opera 10 Beta 3 didn't do as well as Opera 9.6.4, and in a couple quick tests, it doesn't appear that the final release of Opera 10 changes the situation at all. Opera in general — version 9 or 10 — looks like it doesn't do as well as the other major browsers. Safari is at the back, by a large margin, on all three test notebooks. We suspect that Safari 4 does better under OS X, however, so the poor Windows result probably won't matter to most Safari users.'"
with IE8
IE8 + adblock would give even better results!
Seriously though, how can you browse the web *without* adblock? I've shoulder surfed people doing it, and I'd rather eat my own hand.
I for one welcome our new battery life saving overl-... wait... what?
Flash is a pig, no matter what browser you use.
Infections last longer with IE8. Read the summary if not the article. Sheesh!
It's all about wget on single user mode.
Nothing beats Links or Lynx when it comes it this.
Did they have total control over exactly what ads appeared on the sites they visited (obviously excluding any of the tests running adblockers)? If not, then that introduces a decent variable right there. I give very little credence to tests like this one due to pretty obvious flaws in their methodology.
The difference is within background noise - as are all these stupid tests.
No sig today...
So IE8 is more battery friendly? Is that before or after having to install a virus scanner to keep an eye on what IE is doing?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Slow news day, guys? I mean, seriously -- who is going to choose a browser based on how long it'll keep working in a laptop battery life test? And what's the control group for this test, anyway? In the real world, some guy decides he wants some ramen and suddenly my wifi connectivity goes to crap. What if it's really bright in the room and I have to turn the brightness up on the LCD? Well and truly, there's about a hundred things more important than which browser I'm using that affect battery life.
Now, I'm off to make some ramen and make my neighbor scream bloody murder as his high resolution download of some porn star stalls halfway through and he's stuck staring at an incomplete image for the next three minutes exactly. muwaaaaah....
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Given how far behind technically IE is otherwise, I think this is called "grasping at straws".
Seems like blocking all unnecessary flash would yield an improvement, rather than just the advertising related crap.
The summary would lead you to believe that they only tested two laptops. However, they also tested a netbook and in this case, "chome 2" (their spelling, not mine), won. Why didn't the submitter didn't mention this test where IE8 didn't win?
represent!
*Why* IE 8 gets better battery life than Safari? Is it simply because IE 8 has better, more efficient code? Is it because Safari is spending more processor resources getting me my pages quickly? (in which case perhaps Safari still gives the highest battery measured by numbers of pages visited) Is it because of OS integration (all the tests were run on Windows Vista or XP) in which case isn't IE (a) cheating (b) introducing other tradeoffs (security, etc.)? A virus might ultimately cost me more battery life, so even if my battery life is the solitary end in which I place concern, these other factors are still relevant. It is an interesting report, but given that the results are very close, I think it's hard to draw any substantial conclusions from it (except that viewing ads costs battery life).
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Yes, you suspect right. On my 2.5 year old MacBook's (13", 2ghz c2d, gma950) battery with over -600- recharge cycles, I still get about 3.5 hours of "wireless productivity" browsing the web - the battery gave me close to 4.5 hours when brand new, and this battery model is only ~65% as capacitive as the new 13" MacBook Pro's integrated thingy.
Chrome beats other browsers by 4% in sound card usage.
Seriously, I don't think the "raw" laptop battery life means something else that what it means...
What would be somehow an interesting test is to measure the number of cycles/instructions a browser needs to:
* load a page.
* render a page.
* animate a page during 1 minutes.
Of course, with parallelism, it surely isn't as simple as that, but at least it would give an hint about the efficiency of your browser. Maybe someone can come with a more interesting test?
Is there any real question as to who pays the bills on slashdot any more? What is this, the 10th story covering Microsoft today alone?
Is this really a surprise given than IE is built into the Windows system anyway? Explorer is running in the background no matter what, so when you start up Firefox or any other browser its going to run on top of explorer.
On my Toshiba laptop with dual-core 2gz AMD processor and 3GB of RAM running Vista Ultimate, I haven't noticed any battery life differences per se, but I definitely have fewer memory issues with IE8 than I do with Firefox, and its generally much nicer to use than IE 7 was. I use Firefox on my EeePC which runs Windows XP, and I'm certainly not anti-firefox, but I notice it does tend to bog down.
I tried Opera a few months ago, but found that it broke formatting on a lot of sites that I frequent and had a lot of weird features that kept getting in my way. I don't care if saying that I think IE8 is pretty cool isn't the 'popular' opinion, and I sure as hell don't know about battery life issues, but I think its a pretty decent browser either way.
A far better test metric would be CPU/mem/swap usage. If those 3 didn't have a direct relationship to battery life nothing will.
I would like to see the test run using lynx also.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Even with an external battery I've been in situations where a few extra minutes of battery would be helpful. Knowing I can save dozens of minutes by using FF+adblock (or even IE8?) compared to opera or safari is beneficial. The adblocking would be obvious (and I know you can cumbersomely add that into opera) but it doesn't explain IE8.
battery life is not the deciding factor in which browser I use. I've also heard that using Windows has better battery life than using any Linux distro. That still won't decide it for me.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Considering that it takes my poor Eee PC up to a minute to render the /. homepage at 100% cpu usage with FF3, I'm not surprised.
Simple. :)
Internet Explorer is 'just' a shell around Explorer - all the components it needs are pretty much there and often locked into memory (which means not swapped out, and disk access is the mindkiller I mean batter killer). I imagine this is sufficient to cover the difference.
Still not giving up my Flashblock+Adblock+Noscript though. Especially on the laptop.
All this theoretical stuff is nice and everything, but how about some testing under real world conditions? All this pie-in-the-sky stuff means nothing to me.
Install privoxy, configure it as proxy, configure it to block ads. Problem solved. And it's not really all that difficult, either. Ans is useful for other things (using TOR, etc.) too.
...you'd also be running Windows as your OS. How does running Windows affect battery life?
I'd like to see it in a contest over what really matters - properly rendering valid HTML and executing javascript without throwing up pointless alerts. Then we'll give a crap about battery life.
4:00 AM: Intrepid counter-terrorism agent Jack Bauer, gun drawn, kicks open the door to a small flat in a run-down apartment building. The nefarious Evil-Doer turns to face the door, clearly shocked.
Evil-Doer (played by Jerry Seinfeld): Agent Jack Bauer! How can this be? That laptop had three, maybe four minutes of battery life left on it, at most! How could you possibly have downloaded those files in time?!
Jack Bauer: Simple.
Bauer turns to face the camera, which quickly zooms in on his face.
Jack Bauer: I used Internet Explorer 8.
A giant explosion rocks the screen, and a huge Internet Explorer logo appears.
Announcer: Internet Explorer 8. Because on the Internet, seconds matter.
Obviously this can't be easily verified, but safari is designed around OSX, and probably includes various emulation libraries to replace what is missing in Windows. OSX not only provides the features that Windows Safari needs to emulate, but probably implements them better (basic economics here: Apple would spend far more time and effort on an efficient implemention in OSX than in an efficient emulation of those facilities in Windows.) Thus Windows IE vs Windows Safari isn't a particularly informative comparison (about as useful as OSX IE8, which doesn't exist, vs OSX Safari 4.
-- The Grand Teddy Bear has Spoken: "Windows 8 Source Code Available NOW! more disgusting than your pr..."
hell just froze over. sin to your heart's content (as long as you don't mind the cold).
weinersmith
In my experience all of the browsers listed render HTML and especially JS far faster than IE8. Who needs battery life when you are able to get things done significantly faster? This is becoming more and more true with new JS engines coming out almost monthly and providing significant performance improvements over older version and IE8.
I hope that the test was done so that it tells how many times you can fetch some page with your battery.
Otherwise, it is natural that IE8 wins. It is no wonder that it does not use battery because it is slower than others.
Any application that you never run saves battery life.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
[IE8 HTML Rendering Console] ... OK ... ... OK ... : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Acid3ie8rc1.png
Fetching index.html
Parsing HTML
ERROR: Unknown tag > Skipping to next tag.
ERROR: Unknown tag > Skipping to next tag.
ERROR: Unknown tag > Skipping to next tag.
Parsing
Visualising Page
Conclusion:
Yes it took less processing power to skip half of the tags and not render half of the page. And yes IE8 just saved you 0.0001% of your battery while opening this page. If the page is visualised incorrectly you can try an alternative browser. Be advised that other browsers MIGHT NOT SAVE AS MUCH BATTERY AS IE8 DOES!
Who the hell cares? It's like saying, "hitting yourself in the head with a brick will get you to sleep faster than counting sheep." Yes, they both get you to sleep, but take a guess which one I'd rather do.
Well of course IE8 gives the longest battery life, it only shows "this website could not be displayed"
What is the point beside being microsoft propaganda?
Here a better way to extend battery life!
Don't turn the laptop on, then the battery last even longer and I've never experienced a Windows crash with the power turned off!
What is it compared to running Windows 3.11 and netscape on modern equipment?
Companies are either getting desperate for stories or Micr$oft is started again on the Windows propaganda.
Windows 7 - best OS in the world - says Microsoft , IE 8 the best browser ever - says microsoft, Vista - safest OS in the world - says microsoft, dito dito dito!
How much did they get from MS for this "test"
That's the only platform they tested in this situation, it's not a surprise really.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
If you are that concerned about battery life that 2% from changing browser makes a difference then you should really consider using a more lightweight operating system. That would also allow you to run with decent performance on hardware better optimized for low power consumption.
> ...the poor Windows result probably won't matter to most Safari users.
Nothing matters to most Safari users. They're too cool.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Whats the best battery life Text rendering?
i'm pretty much over everything having to do with live content being loaded when i'm not in the mood for live scrolling bacardii's.
Just plain text, displayed in a nice readable way would suit my need to actually ingest information, all the rest is just bacarri's scrolling on the counter top of my desktop-sigforbid
...it is seriously better than any other IE version in terms of not making web designers sad. So the comparison I would like to see is between IE7 or 6. As long as 8 won.
Doubt.It, The comic
I've been using IE since forever, as have most people. And like those same people, I've had to tolerate session-ending bugs and glitches that get fixed in one version, only to reappear in another. I did some research on market penetration for browsers http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0 and IE commands nearly 67%, Firefox is nearly at 23%, Safari is at 4%, Chrome is at 2.8% and Opera is just a hair over 2%. I've been using Opera 10 since it was released a few days ago and the one thing that stands out is that showstopping bugs and glitches occur more often in Opera than in IE. My browser preferences are simple in that I'm not fixated on the toolbar appearance, tabs or addressbar search options, or page layout. It's one simple feature - how long I can continue to use it before it shuts down due to an unrecoverable error. I've got to say that I like Opera, I want to love them the product is solid and clean but when Opera10 starts to slowdown and fail to open a page, IE always comes through. There's a reason why they are at 66% with at least 20 free mainstream browsers on the market to choose from. A large part of that market penetration came from and is still commanded because IE is proven. It's not especially fancy or prettied up with features that a lot of the newer generation browsers flaunt, but 66% is still nothing to laugh at.
... those people aren't.
"Each test was run at least twice." If they were run at least 10 or 20 times you'd be able to estimate from the variance in the scores if the differences were significant.
The netbook had almost identical measures for all except Safari (caveat to significance, as above). Does anyone think it matters that the two laptops were running Vista and IE8, a fairly integrated collection of software, likely installed together, whereas all the others were thrown on top of an operating system that never could get the hang of running much more than itself.
Anyone want to put odds on whether the difference in drive activity in trying to (1) run MS operating system with MS vs. non-MS software and (2) run stuff installed together vs. installed after, would be proportional to the observed differences in battery life?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
On a Mac, Firefox will use somewhere around 1% extra CPU for each additonal document open, even if none of them have flash or animated images. For instance, right now, I have 34 documents open, and it's using 17% CPU constant (which is unusually low). Nothing's going on. I've checked all of the documents. No animations, and gmail is the only one with any active Javascript. I've compared it to Safari, and it'll use roughly 0% for the same load.
The reason I switched to Firefox is because its memory consumption is WAY better. But then it burns CPU and eats battery charge. So I have to close tabs. So basically there's no point. On Safari, I'm restricted by memory; on Firefox, I'm restricted by CPU. As soon as Saft has a 64-bit version, I'm switching back.
There is a whole host of other ways in which Firefox devs treat the Mac like a second-class citizen. Firefox works great on Windows and Linux, but it has all sorts of problems on the Mac. It's less stable, eats more CPU, and it even prevents the Mac from automatically going to sleep after you've left it alone for a while (known bug, something to do with sqlite, lots of people comment on the bugzilla entry, none of them devs).
Its informative when Safari vs IE vs FF vs Opera is one of the choices the *average* person faces.
"His name was James Damore."
We suspect that Safari 4 does better under OS X, however,
Well, I'm guessing that IE8 performs very poorly under OS X.
... and then they built the supercollider.
The very concept of testing browsers for battery life is deeply flawed, since it's the OS and hardware that govern it. That's where it should be tested, with a variety of different software loads.
It would have been nice for them to give some data, if the battery life is 3 mins longer then it's kinda practically worthless. Besides I never thought of battery life as the arbiter of what makes a good browser. This seems like a microsoft PR piece where they want to focus on the only thing that seems like a redeeming quailty. Silicon Valley is full of so called "independent' groups that take money for favorable "studies" Aberdeen group anyone? IE fails in the most important test in my book, it's too damn frustratingly slow to start and to load pages. And on top of it it's a microsoft product which means there's a ton of unnecessary code in it so that it plugs into other MS products somehow which cause it to crash like most MS products. Safari is just as crap on a PC. I hope chrome shakes up this market a bit, we haven't had any substantial progress in browsers since 2000. All the current browsers use a more evolved version of the original Netscape browser interface design. I guess once MS kills off the competition it can sit on it's laurels and just release pointless upgrades. But what I despise mostly about MS is the fact that they are so bad, they make Apple (which is only good by comparison) look good.
I didn't realise that browsers regulated laptop battery life.
I thought battery life was controlled by the Operating System regulating such things as CPU clock speed on that particular computer.
Or is this report really talking about how many CPU clock cycles a browser uses to render a page?
If so then the report should be re-written to say what it means. As it stands the headline appears to be misleading.
Ok. Let me get this straight. The conclusion is to use IE 8 because it uses the least battery life? Presumably, that implies (loosely) that it has the most effective algorithms for rendering modern pages. AnandTech should really compare apples to apples, and leave the orange out of the picture. What good is a modern browser that saves a bit of battery life, when it doesn't have a working Javascript garbage collector to free up memory on Javascript-heavy sites? I suspect that any user who's IE8 browser session just caused their Windows[File] Explorer to crash due to memory resource starvation might not care about how much battery life their IE8 session just saved them. I could be wrong, of course. "They tested on simple web pages..." --kudos. Because, that's what surfers are most likely to encounter on today's modern world wide web. My impression is that this study is seriously flawed, although I might have missed the point.
It never bothers to try to render the page correctly therefore saving cycles. This is good for battery life.
It needs that extra battery life, considering it's also the slowest browser.
no matter which browser you are using. Using the one that's already "running" would likely conserve some energy.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
Who cares about the battery life? What I'd like to see was how they managed to find that variety of machinery and OS (etc), that ran the same background processes on hardware that had all the same components/performance and little things like voltage to each module of all units. And of course they must have made sure that all the operating systems were using the same shared libs and everything ... wow!!!!
Native browsers (IE on MS, Safari on OS X) always give a better result for overall performance.
If they're not tied into the OS, they're about a centimeter away from doing so.
I noticed this on OS X the other week, FireFox on a MacBook starts the fans blazing, whereas with Safari you only get it for Flash and Video sites.
LOL! So, uhm, you did your best to make it as distant from real life browsing habits as possible. Good job.
Yeah, or it just takes longer to display the time consuming things haha... or a myriad of other possible explanations... what's the point of testing this, when you don't even have a closer look at how the browsers operate? It's like leaving the meat of the subject as an exercise to the reader..
You might also wanna look into "how fast do you get from point A to point B (on the web) using browser X and battery power amount Y, without your hair turning grey", which is a far cry from "sitting there idly and pressing F5 three times once a minute".
i would rather plug in my laptop earlier than use internet explorer 8.
Maybe. Maybe not. They don't mention anywhere how they tested the laptops. It's just a bunch of voodoo. The results have no meaning. We don't even know if the IE 8 battery life includes the juice required to run the malware.
I wouldn't recommend it, but if anyone actually wants to read TFA, here is the article on 1 page, rather than 5: http://anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3636
And that is why IE8 has the best battery life - the IE version of the Flash player is hardware accelerated.
That's the first I hear of this. Cite?
Call me a troll or a friggin gnome if you want but i hate IE browsers with a passion and i hope they die a suffering death someday even if they didn't spend battery life.
I'm sure Lynx would win hands down.
{{.sig}}
Since all the crapware that IE accumulates slows everything down so much.
"AnandTech tested a laptop with an AMD CPU, a laptop with an Intel CPU, and a netbook to compare battery life while running Internet Explorer 8, Opera 10, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome. They tested on simple web pages and flash-infested ones. IE8 had the best battery life on both laptops (followed by FF + AdBlock), and Safari had the worst battery life"
I wonder if anyone else out there ran this test and got the same/differing results. What with 4 Gigs of memory why would the browser keep accessing the harddrive. As presumably the harddrive has the biggest power drain.
... at least until someone manages to pull a cross-zone exploit on your copy of IE8 and it starts relaying viagra ads for a botnet.
Please mod parent -1 Troll
Why only one browser was tested with Adblock, when such addond is available in one form or another in all of them? (and some have it even built in; for example you need to only provide a list to Opera (which also has quick method of toggling on/off plugins (of the Flash/Java/etc. kind), so many people browse by default without them))
One that hath name thou can not otter
Not to mention that Flash under anything else than IE + Windows runs like a slug.
I agree. While I don't know how it runs on IE + Windows, I can say my Firefox with Flash 64bit on GNU/Linux is slow playing flash videos, specially full-screen HD videos.
An easy solution is to pause the flash video (and let it continue buffering), then fire up your favorite accelerated video player: /tmp/Flash4esbN8
mplayer
All the flash videos I've tried are buffered into /tmp (including youtube and vimeo). This allows me to view vimeo's HD videos in full-screen with 90% CPU (and dropped frames) in flash.
Correction:
This allows me to view vimeo's HD videos in full-screen with less than 10% CPU in mplayer/vlc instead of over 90% CPU (and dropped frames) in flash.
Sorry, I wrote the less and greater characters and were removed by slashdot, also taking out some text in the process.
Isn't it?
NoScript + FlashBlock take care of all the ads that bother me...and BetterPrivacy makes sure the sites mind their own damn business. No need for AdBlock, I don't mind sites making an honest buck. Intrusive, annoying or resource-intensive ads aren't loaded so I'm voting with my eyeballs.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
admuncher, better than adblock and works on any browser in windows
What the article actually shows is that all browsers, apart from Safari 4, are within a few percent of each other in energy usage. Even Safari isn't significantly far behind - 10% isn't going to make you choose another browser over it, considering you probably picked Safari for some other important feature in the first place.
So the real conclusions are not drawn in the article or in any comments I see here:
You're likely seeing the strong correlation between low CPU usage and low power usage, but again - none of them really focus on power. There's a lot of tricks you can do to make that huge leap (hint: network/disk usage and fancy offloaded graphics are low CPU but huge power users). None do them. I suspect Safari is chewing more power by having those fancy Apple-style transitions and widgets being rendered, which if you can turn off, will yield a runtime similar to the other browsers.
This is where the real battle will occur: when long battery life form factors start to become very popular, and browser authors realise that efficiency is worth just as much as features.
I actually use AdBlock for a bunch of sites. (Although it drives me nuts that it has a whitelist, but no blacklist. I'd actually like to keep it off for all domains except a few, and there's no way of doing that.)
I'm just fucking sick of reading about it. Any time there's a story that's even vaguely about web browsers, you can guarantee a parade of +5 "AdBlock is great!" posts that have absolutely zero new content, and usually virtually nothing to do with the topic at hand. Part of this is the moderator's fault (who the fuck is modding these redundant content-free posts up!?), but the people who post the same threads over and over are to blame as well.
If you don't have anything to say, just say nothing. Instead of knee-jerking and posting "AdBlock is great!"
Comment of the year
I run firefox on an ubuntu 9.04 computer. I monitor power consumption with powertop. Firefox is the worst culprit when it comes to battery waste. Sometimes, out of the blue, it keeps running at >90% CPU utilization. At least that is easy to detect because the computer gets hot.
But more often than not, Firefox keeps the CPU busy in state C0, and even if its CPU usage is small, the CPU just can't go into power savings mode. Firefox can account for 3-10 watts of usage on a regular session.
The problem is, even if I close all the windows/tabs and leave only a static document in the only window left, firefox keeps using the CPU. The only solution is to kill it and restart it. It is frustrating.
Whenever I want maximum battery life, Firefox is killed first, followed by the wireless card (using the physical switch). By doing these two things I can expand battery life by 50% (assuming Firefox is not misbehaving my laptop uses ~ 15 watts, 10 without firefox and wireless, and screen at 30% brightness).
-dmg
Are you claiming the POS laptops used in this review have flash GPU acceleration?
We're not talking about running Crysis on Vista with all the latest DirectX 10 eye-candy shaders enabled.
Most of flash applets have some text, and a few vector graphics. For fuck's sake, that doesn't even need texturing. Texture come only in play when you consider video playing and scaling.
Modern chipsets even the crappiest ones, do at least have some blitting and primitive (drawing geometric shapes) capabilities. That's pretty much enough to accelerate flash.
Nobody needs a GeForce or a Radeon for that.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]