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.'"

Comments

So in theory

[sakdoctor]

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.

Re:So in theory

[Swizec]

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.

You can't have a problem when you don't know any better.

It's also not a problem if you simply don't browse anywhere there's too many ads. See ads you don't like? Just close the fucking website, it's a worthless piece of shit anyway if it puts ads first and content later.

Re:So in theory

[Blakey Rat]

Every single one of these articles instantly devolves into a thread about AdBlock. Yes, we get it. A lot of people here like AdBlock. Can we stop fucking posting the same fucking thread in every fucking single fucking article? Christ.

It's like Ron Paul in the politics tab during the election.

Re:So in theory

[GF678]

Just close the fucking website, it's a worthless piece of shit anyway if it puts ads first and content later.

deviantART once had a Flash add which utilised 100% of my CPU, and since it was at the time a single-core CPU, I was barely able to bring up the Task Manager to kill it. Interestingly enough, it was that experience which pushed me to using Adblock Plus.

Point is, deviantART is hardly a worthless piece of shit. Sometimes they just made bad choices about what ads to use. Generalizations are bad, m'kay?

The real conclusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash is a pig, no matter what browser you use.

Re:The real conclusion

[AndreR]

But the thing is, IE processing pages with ads and flash was *more* efficient and less demanding on the CPU than Firefox processing pages with no ads at all.

That comes to me as quite a shock, given that Flash is, in fact, a pig.

Re:The real conclusion

[Arterion]

Kindof. It may just mean that the flash plugin for IE is less battery intensive than the flash plugin for FF.

We'd have to no-flash, flash-only, and a mix to figure it out. The tests here didn't.

This can't turn into a comparison of Microsoft vs Mozilla... it's probably more like a comparison of Adobe programmers on different teams.

Re:2% difference... big deal.

[adolf]

No, really. It's a meaningless number.

There's no control in this experiment (and, no, I don't mean "control group.") The fact that they were flogging away at public, and probably dynamic (read: inconsistent) websites totally invalidates the entire comparison.

If Anand wanted to take it seriously, they should have eliminated more variables. If they'd set up a dedicated, light-weight web server running in a controlled minimalist environment (bare Slackware+Apache, perhaps?) somewhere on a dedicated LAN, that would have been be a good start. They might even have used a RAM disk to ensure consistent access times to the data being served.

Hell: They should have even measured the battery voltage both before and after the tests, to eliminate (or at least quantify) any incongruity in the charging circuit's behavior. And they should've made sure to rotate their testing, so as to average it out as the battery ages (which it quite measurably will in these relatively-abusive full-charge - full-discharge tests).

But they didn't do these things. And it might seem like I'm splitting hairs here, but the results are close enough that hairs must be split.

Meanwhile, I think battery life while browsing is an interesting and very practical metric which is often overlooked these days. I applaud them for attempting and documenting such a feat, which I'm sure was relatively time-consuming, and I admonish them for doing a piss-poor job of it.

(And, no: I don't care which browser "wins." I have most of the tested browsers installed on my own laptop, and for me, it would be instructive to know which one will conserve battery life best in times when I know I'll be without power for a long period of time.)