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

[GF678]

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.

Re:So in theory

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I really wouldn't switch to IE 8 for this, or many other reasons that it might supposedly be better. It's 7 minutes longer than FF with adblock, or 4% longer. Not nearly enough difference to justify using a program that doesn't work the way that I like, not to mention one that presents such a major target for malware.

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

[Rewind]

I don't really think it is all that bad. I use Firefox on my Windows desktop, Firefox on my Slackware desktop, and Safari on my MacBook Pro, neither have any additional plugins or anything like adblock. Just the default pop up blockers. Depends on where you browse I guess.

Re:So in theory

[sgant]

I have to agree. I'm on a Macbook Pro now and using Snow Leopard with it's 64-bit Safari. Everyone is saying how fast and quick Safari is...along with Chrome, but the simple fact is both of these browsers don't have Adblock so they're actually SLOWER than Firefox with Adblock because they all have to load in those ads.

Maybe Safari and Chrome are fast on a test....but in real world situations without adblock, they're slow.

Re:So in theory

[ivucica]

I have this fascinating ability that adblock users apparently lack: it's called "Ignore Irrelevance". You see, while those ads may be there ... I don't really see them. They are there if I concentrate hard enough to notice them ... but otherwise, they're not really there.

Probably explains how I can surf without adblock.

And, oh yeah, I occasionally like to support the site I'm visiting when I notice something actually interesting.

Re:So in theory

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Loading less content is faster than loading more content???

Tell me, how did you figure that out???

Re:So in theory

[EvilIdler]

If your Safari doesn't have AdBlock, install it: http://burgersoftware.com/en/safariadblock
(32-bit for now...source available)

I also recommend ClickToFlash: http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/

Re:So in theory

[LifesABeach]

And in a similar story from the North West of the U.S. Young Arctic Muskoxen Better At Keeping Warm Than Scientists Thought, I really didn't know that Scientists of the North West thought of "Young Arctic Muskoxen",

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?

Re:So in theory

[JohnBailey]

Aren't you looking back right now?

No.. If I was, I wouldn't be able to see the monitor.

Re:So in theory

[shutdown -p now]

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

Yeah, well, if you were using Firefox, you could get the RonPaulBlock plugin... ~

Re:So in theory

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

me neither, at the very... oh look, a cool flash animation! And it's like, OMG Ponies!

Re:So in theory

[ceoyoyo]

While the work of the artists who post on DeviantArt may or might not be worthless pieces of shit, a web page that sucks 100% of your CPU making it difficult to even close the page, never mind view it, most definitely is.

Re:So in theory

[Runaway1956]

Spoiled by speed. That is really funny.

When dial up internet finally became available in my area, pages loaded fairly quickly. Sometimes, I had to wait for a page, but overall, pages loaded fairly quickly. As time went on, and Flash and Java became more and more embedded in pages, my browser slowed more and more. Javascript slowed it even more. The browser itself became ever larger, both in code size and memory requirements. Near the end of my dial up experience, browsing was definitely painful. Even with Adblock, HOSTS, and other optimizations, pages would often take 15, 20, 30 seconds to load. That is NOT "browsing".

I've had ADSL for 25 months now. Pages still don't just snap up, like they do at the community college, where they have a sizeable pipeline. My latency blows, and my real speed is only about 80% of the advertised 384/128. Spoiled? I'm sure there are a lot of spoiled people out there enjoying connections that never lag, and downloading the biggest movies in an hour or less. I assure you, I'm not one of them.

I for one...

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one welcome our new battery life saving overl-... wait... what?

The real conclusion

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:The real conclusion

[Yvan256]

Not to mention that Flash under anything else than IE + Windows runs like a slug.

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:The real conclusion

[bhtooefr]

And that is why IE8 has the best battery life - the IE version of the Flash player is hardware accelerated.

No no no!

[Anonymous Coward]

Infections last longer with IE8. Read the summary if not the article. Sheesh!

Yeah right

[Brian Gordon]

It's all about wget on single user mode.

Re:Yeah right

[Anonymous Coward]

RMS, is that you?

Bad Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing beats Links or Lynx when it comes it this.

Did they have total control?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

2% difference... big deal.

[Joce640k]

The difference is within background noise - as are all these stupid tests.

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.)

Re:2% difference... big deal.

[vadim_t]

No, seriously, who cares?

If you get 2 hours of battery time, this gains you about 2 minutes and half.

For 5 hours of battery time you get 6 minutes extra.

If you really want to extend battery time, turning down the screen brightness by a notch will probably have more effect.

Re:2% difference... big deal.

[RiotingPacifist]

I skimmed the article and couldn't find anything on their method. There is a lot of relevent data that i simply couldn't see
1) Which has the lowest wakeups/bat usage once the page is rendered (some of us still read content instead of loading pages all day)?
2) Which has the lowest wakeups/bat usage on an active page, facebook,gmail,etc?
3) Which uses the least CPU/bat to render pages?
4) is there any difference in CPU/bat usage of flash?

Then there is so much to be asked about the method:
a)Was the environment controlled?
b)as i understand it, using a mouse uses quite a bit of battery, was all the navigation done using keyboard shortcuts?
c)was it scripted? (if so where all scripts equal?)
d)Was this done continuously rendering pages?
e)Does it really matter which lasts the longest if it takes longer to render the pages?/How long did each browser spend rendering pages? (e.g if chrome spend 10% less time rendering pages then you could end up with 13 more mins to actually viewing pages)

Re:2% difference... big deal.

[Eirenarch]

Except that IE is not the slowest browser of all. In fact IE is probably the fastest browser in completing a page load and this is why MS picked this comparison when they claimed that IE is the fastest browser. As Mark Twain said "Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please." IE is very slow when running JavaScript but this is something completely different.

Re:2% difference... big deal.

[BikeHelmet]

You should use your favourite browser, because you'll be more productive in it.

Teach yourself to read or write 10% faster, and that'll dwarf the savings a different browser provides.

Re:2% difference... big deal.

[adolf]

So you propose, AC, that adding more random noise to the test would improve the reliability of the results moreso than controlling the test environment?

I'm no statistician, either, but your proposal sounds like it would be more difficult (define "random" in this context, including time of day), more time-consuming, and less accurate.

Battery life test

[Wowsers]

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?

Uhh.. whiskey tango foxtrot?

[girlintraining]

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....

I think...

[speedtux]

Given how far behind technically IE is otherwise, I think this is called "grasping at straws".

It seems the article also tested a netbook

[joeflies]

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?

But what is the justification?

[physicsphairy]

*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).

This makes sense - it's better integrated.

[Sarusa]

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.

New IE8 Commercial

[goldmaneye]

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.

Of course it does...

[cffrost]

Any application that you never run saves battery life.

Re:This is a better test.

[hey!]

Firefox has been shown to make it so under not especially exotic conditions.

That's why it's number 1.

Re:No Suprise

[wampus]

Your information is 4 years out of date. Explorer and IExplore are completely separate components.

Speaking as a scientist....

[DynaSoar]

... 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?

Seriously flawed studay.

[stavrica]

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.

Re:Wait a second...

[bhtooefr]

Very simple experiment - obtain a temperature monitor that can show you CPU and GPU temperatures. (This usually needs discrete graphics, although some integrated graphics systems hide the northbridge temperature as the "PCI" temperature.) Monitor CPU load, as well.

Start a flash video in IE. Note what happens to all temperatures - CPU load will be low, CPU temps won't change much, GPU temps will rise.

Now, start a flash video in any other browser (that isn't IE-based.) CPU load will be (comparatively) high, and CPU temps will rise. GPU temps will stay steady, or at most climb a couple degrees just because of being heated by the CPU.