Browser Power Consumption Compared

theweatherelectric writes "Over on the IE Blog they've posted a power consumption comparison of the five major browsers. They write: 'Power consumption is an important consideration in building a modern browser and one objective of Internet Explorer 9 is to responsibly lead the industry in power requirements. The more efficiently a browser uses power the longer the battery will last in a mobile device, the lower the electricity costs, and the smaller the environment impact. While power might seem like a minor concern, with nearly two billion people now using the Internet the worldwide implications of browser power consumption are significant.'"

Comments

Efficiency Features

[schnikies79]

At least at this point in my computing; I'm all for low power consumption computers that are small and quiet.

That said, as far as browsers, I run Chrome.

Can the source be trusted?

[grapes911]

It is on msdn.com. Can we consider this a partial and fair article? I'm asking, not accusing.

Re:Can the source be trusted?

[pushing-robot]

More specifically, the IE blog. While it's not exactly the mouthpiece of Microsoft PR, every development team is going to be biased toward their own product and show benchmarks that put their work in a positive light.

That said, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if IE9 is slightly more efficient than other browsers on Windows, since the IE devs have closer access to the OS than other teams, Safari brings a truckload of extra libraries to clone OS X, and Opera... is Opera.

Oh, and what idiot modded the parent "redundant"?

Re:Can the source be trusted?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and what idiot modded the parent "redundant"?

From what I've seen, it's being used for lack of a "-1: Really Obvious" mod.

Re:Can the source be trusted?

[Gadget_Guy]

It is on msdn.com. Can we consider this a partial and fair article? I'm asking, not accusing.

Given how well Firefox fared then it seems that they have been fair with their reporting. Considering the tiny difference between IE9 and FF4 then you might as well choose between the browsers based on the features that you want.

That said, this is an IE9 blog we are talking about. I doubt that anyone could consider them to be impartial. They posted this because they want to spruik their browser. But at least they did not try to hide this by paying for it to appear in an "independent" magazine or website.

My only complaint is that I would like to know the system specs of their test machines. I would like to see this comparison on a netbook platform with a feeble GPU, because if you are seriously concerned with power usage then you probably already use a power-friendly processor like the Intel Atom.

Re:Can the source be trusted?

[Tim C]

Nit-picking, but you mean impartial, not partial.

Re:Can the source be trusted?

[gilesjuk]

It's not really a useful test unless it is conducted by an independent test team who are not receiving any money from the organisation who produced the software.

Re:Efficiency Features

[schnikies79]

Efficiency (is greater than) Features.

Since when could slashdot not show a greater than symbol?

Re:Efficiency Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct function >>> optimization

Remember:

1. Make it work
2. Make it work right
3. Make it work fast

Tail wagging the dog?

[synthesizerpatel]

Since they're not the fastest, they're claiming their the most power-friendly.

"We did it on purpose.. see?"

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Anonymous Coward]

I commend Microsoft's efforts to lower browser power consumption. It's not just about improving battery life, but being kind to the environment. Great job!

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they add in the extra power consumption caused by the requirement to run Windows? I personally get at least an hour less on my dual-boot machine when I boot the Windows partition.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[gman003]

Actually, if you read TFA, on most (75%) of the their own tests, they're beaten by Firefox. One of the bits is particularly embarrassing - IE uses the most power of any browser when rendering about:blank. It seemed a bit unscientific (only four sites, one of which couldn't be run by Opera), but it's a blog, not the New England Journal of HTML Rendering.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Xacid]

about:blank = all white screen. I'm not entirely schooled in the science of LCDs but with CRTs that meant much more energy required to produce that image. Is that a possible reason for the power draw?

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Rockoon]

With LCD's, the backlight is always on regardless of what is on screen.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[gman003]

1. They did not measure the power consumption of the screen, only the CPU, memory, GPU, GMCH, disk, NIC and "uncore", whatever that last one is. Only time I've heard the term was in reference to clock multipliers on certain Intel processors.
2. LCD screens use constant power - you'd use as much power displaying all black as all white.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[dgatwood]

IE uses the most power of any browser when rendering about:blank.

So in other words, IE's idle performance sucks. That's usually an easy thing to fix.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[dakameleon]

LCDs are slightly more efficient at white; in an LCD, the backlight is typically white and the pixels determine which colour is let through, so for black the pixels need to block the light coming through. The difference is only just passing statistical significance at 6%.

Note however that this isn't true of AMOLED screens.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you may want to go and reread TFA.

about:blank System Idle IE9 Chrome 10 Firefox 4 Opera 11 Safari 5
System 10.529 W 10.668 W 10.658 W 10.664 W 11.290 W 11.040 W
Battery Life 5:19 hrs 5:14 hrs 5:15 hrs 5:15 hrs 4:57 hrs 5:04 hrs

It has the best battery life, if you left it on about:blank, according to their chart. The only exception is Opera, who lowered the timer resolution (preventing the CPU from lowering its power state).

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Ash-Fox]

With LCD's, the backlight is always on regardless of what is on screen.

My netbook (an Acer Aspire One) has a power feature where it can use low lighting and greater gamma values to use less power but present a picture at the same brightness depending on the pixel colors used on the screen. Appears to be a driver function in the AMD graphics provided.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[taktoa]

Uncore is the cache, internal cpu circuitry (other than the actual core), and possibly the chipset.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Ndkchk]

Actually, if you read more than the last chart of TFA, you see that Opera uses the most power when rendering about:blank. The last chart is pretty misleading if you're making an across-the-board comparison on anything other than the total runtime.

IE wins 3/4 of the tests, with Firefox typically running a close second. It does not win on about:blank, but is about a tenth of a percent off from Chrome there.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Anonymous Coward]

What you've just written shows IE9 at 5:14hrs and Firefox and Chrome at 5:15hrs of battery life. IE9 doesn't have the best battery life.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[VortexCortex]

Since they're not the fastest, they're claiming their the most power-friendly.

"We did it on purpose.. see?"

Actually, I just got a new notebook with Windows 7 pre-installed. I immediately imaged the system, then installed Linux (dual boot). I do believe that MS's products use FAR less power than open source software like Firefox & Linux... bear with me...

I used an external USB hard drive enclosure to transfer my over 21,000 songs ( not pirated -- I fervently support local indie / folk bands ).

Linux was copying files faster than I was used to ( only 1h 40m est. time ), I attributed this to the faster hardware. When I checked back in on the copy process the computer was locked up. At first I thought that a flaky NTFS Linux driver was the problem, the caps lock key was flashing (usually means a kernel panic occurred)... so I re-booted into Windows7 and re-initiated the file transfer.

After 1 and a half hours the estimated time till completion was still 2.5 hours. Thinking that was pretty strange for Windows7 to take over 150% more time than the Linux system reported, I tried again with my Linux install: wiping out the music partition and starting again.

Sure enough, the files transfered almost twice as fast. The CPU usage went to 100% on both cores, and the fans went into high gear... Near the end of the transfer (98%) at 1h:33m the computer froze again with the same flashing capslock indicator...

I completed the file transfer with Windows, and noticed that it only used 70% of one core to do the file transfer... Searching online led me to a hardware user guide for the system that said the flashing capslock meant that the CPU overheated. It wasn't a problem with Linux after all. I sent the machine back to the manufacturer and they stress tested the CPU, found it was weak, and replaced it with a new one.

I purchased a cooling mat for when I use Linux -- I don't need it when running Windows: MS won't let me use the hardware to its full potential, so it uses less CPU gets better battery life and doesn't overheat.

Of course, I can always adjust the CPU usage on Linux to achieve the same power consumption, but I can't make Windows use the full CPU power -- It won't let me.

Without the multi-core aware Linux, I wonder how long it would have taken me to notice I had a weak CPU. If I had used only MS Windows, I probably wouldn't have noticed until after the warranty expired...

I posit that most times MS software is getting better power consumption than their competitors -- It's because the routines aren't using multiple threads to get the best speeds... Which is just dumb if you ask me, multi-core machines have less power per core on average. Single threaded code on a 3ghz single core machine goes twice as fast as the same code on a "faster" 6Ghz quad core machine (1.5Ghz per core). If you're not writing multi threaded code you're burying your head in the sand.

(Wooo! Lookit how much battery life you get with dumb single threaded code!)

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[zippthorne]

But the level it is on at depends upon the brightest pixel on the screen. The whole "contrast" vs. "dynamic contrast" thing, after all.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[zippthorne]

Although.. that would be a nice setting to be able to toggle: throttle back to avoid turning the fan on. If I'm moving a large number of files in the background, ofte I care less about how long it takes and more about what else I can do while they're moving around.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[hedwards]

I know, but what if my company won't let me upgrade to Firefox?

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[jrumney]

Are you suggesting that Firefox, Chrome and Opera are cheating by rendering the background of about:blank as slightly grey? Because I can't think of any other scenario in which the LCD would be the differentiating variable here.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, they mean "non-core" then.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[aaron552]

"Uncore" is (AFAIK) Intel-speak for functions within the CPU package that are not part of a CPU core (including the memory and PCI-E controllers in current-gen Intel CPUs)

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[aaron552]

Set the CPU governor to "powersave" eg.

# cpufreq-set -c 0 -g powersave
# cpufreq-set -c 1 -g powersave

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[mwolfe38]

mod parent down for being really really bad at math and reading.. 1/4 != 75% IE won all of the tests except the about:blank page which its running time was only 1 minute less than firefox and chrome (and better than the others).. This could easily be considered equivalent given margin of error was probably at least 1%. I'm not touting that these were the best tests in the world but your analysis is quite wrong and I have no idea why you were modded 5, Informative when you should be modded -1, Wrong/

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[aiht]

So, they mean "non-core" then.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually that depends on technology that LCD screen is used to make. With some technologies white is better than black with power consumption but with some other technologies, black is better. You should use power meter to measure which color uses less power on your screen.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[thegarbz]

Yes but LCDs actually require more energy to produce black than white. The reason is the LCD panel is a sandwich of a horizontal polariser, a liquid crystal, and a vertical polariser. The default state of the liquid crystal rotates the polarity angle to match the front polariser, when charge is applied to it the light passes through unaltered in which case it won't pass through the front polarising screen. e.g. apply charge to pixel to produce black. It's not a universal power draw regardless of what you display.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[alexhs]

A few remarks on your post...

A friend of mine noticed years ago that MS-Windows 2000 used tiny buffers for copy, which means that hard drive heads move from source to destination constantly, which is slow, wears out the hard drive, and uses more power (maintaining the rotation speed of platters doesn't use much energy compared to the heads actually moving and writing). He wrote an alternative copy program that was much faster by allocating big buffers. I would bet that MS-Windows 7 still uses small buffers.

When MS-Windows gets better battery life than Linux, one common reason is that it gets better ACPI drivers written by the laptop maker. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if Linux would go through your copy task with better battery than MS-Windows in the end, just because it takes half the time (that is, measuring battery use by task and not by time).

At last, all modern mobile CPUs have dynamic frequency scaling (like SpeedStep) and temperature sensors, and Linux should use them to avoid the overheating. In that sense, there's potentially a bug in Linux that might be worth reporting for investigation. More probably, it is simply a setting, and the default "server" setting is that if your CPU overheats, it means that your server is not cooled enough, which needs to be fixed, and rely on the CPU protection rather than silently throttling back.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Anonymous Coward]

or use taskset to only run it on one core

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[aaron552]

I assume they use a different word to differentiate it from functions outside the CPU core (eg. southbridge features like SATA controllers)

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Anonymous Coward]

tldr

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Xacid]

You're absolutely right. My brain was going on some weird tangent with it that probably didn't make sense but who knows what that was.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Xacid]

You've single-handedly made me completely appreciate the widespread technology of the LCD SO much more. Seriously, that's crazy stuff.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Xacid]

Thanks!

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Anonymous Coward]

On some systems, linux uses more power because the ACPI is setup in such a way so as not comply with the specifications for ACPI, and so only really works with windows...

But when it comes to power usage, you absolutely should let the user control it - if my battery lasts 1 hour on linux and 2 hours on windows, but i need to copy some files which windows takes 3 hours to do and linux can do in 1 hour then its obviously better to have linux since the windows setup simply wont do the job, despite running for longer.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[AmiMoJo]

LCD screens use constant power - you'd use as much power displaying all black as all white.

While your point about the screen not being relevant to browser power tests is correct the above statement is not 100% accurate any more. Some mobile devices vary the brightness of the backlight automatically depending on what is on screen. The amount of variation is not huge but basically they look at the image and decide how much contrast is required to make it readable. I believe the Galaxy S can do it, although that phone uses an AMOLED screen which doesn't have an actual backlight but the principal is the same.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[amliebsch]

Isn't it possible that Windows 7 - on compatible hardware, of course - does temperature-based CPU throttling? That would also account for your observations, and would be compatible with mine, which are that Windows 7 is not appreciably slower (and sometimes quicker) at SMB transfers.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[AmiMoJo]

Your results are probably due to drivers in Windows being more aggressive with power saving and head reduction, rather than any kind of flaw in Windows.

You didn't state what model it was but many modern laptops run pretty close to the thermal limit. It keeps fan speed and noise down, allows them to be thinner and lighter and stick a higher speed CPU in. The only reason it doesn't overheat is because the drivers are aggressively putting things in power saving mode, reducing performance and keeping heat down.

As an example the PCI-E bus can go into a low power state. It takes time to enter it and time to exit it so having it set to switch too often impacts performance. Windows is probably putting it in sleep mode while waiting for every transfer on the USB bus to complete. Similarly it probably puts the SATA bus into a low power state between writes. Linux has power saving features too but they are set by the driver authors for generic use where as the Windows drivers supplied by the manufacturer are probably set to maximum energy/heat saving mode.

Try this: In Windows set customise the power settings to turn off all power saving and run the copy test again. See how much faster it is. Oh, and if it shipped with McAfee or some such shit remember to uninstall (not just disable) that too.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[buddyglass]

Did you read TFA? Both Opera and Safari use more juice than IE on about:blank. IE is in a statistical dead heat with FF4 and Chrome on that one.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for your post - now I see, why in linux, my laptop fans are always running at full speed. It is quite loud and it drains the battery much faster than any windows version does. Couldn't figure it out even after reading tons of forums about fan regulation etc..

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Spykk]

If your CPU is the bottle neck when you transfer files via USB then you have bigger problems than an inefficient OS...

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[marcosdumay]

Depending on your distro and DE, and if you added laptop extensions, it will switch automaticaly to a slower powersave mode when running on bateries, and a fast power hungry mode when plugget into an outlet. There are some configurations that are independent of DE, but I haven't heard about they comming by default on any distro, and of course, both methods are completely configurable, so if you can always run on full power, or never wants the fans to turn on you can do that.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[gilesjuk]

Microsoft generally have an advantage in terms of compiler technology, which is often supplied by Intel. GCC is often shown to produce slower code than Intel's own compiler. This may have result in some Microsoft applications running faster. Not to mention access to some private APIs.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[tlhIngan]

Yes but LCDs actually require more energy to produce black than white. The reason is the LCD panel is a sandwich of a horizontal polariser, a liquid crystal, and a vertical polariser. The default state of the liquid crystal rotates the polarity angle to match the front polariser, when charge is applied to it the light passes through unaltered in which case it won't pass through the front polarising screen. e.g. apply charge to pixel to produce black. It's not a universal power draw regardless of what you display.

It only applies when changing the screen. Going from white->black or black->white requires power.

The LCD electrically appears a lot like DRAM memory - it needs to be refreshed otherwise the data is lost. The pixel itself is driven by a transistor to a huge capacitive spot (the LCD sandwich), akin to a DRAM cell. From there it'll hold its charge until it bleeds off. Some screens fade to white, others to black.

No, the biggest reason why LCDs can save power displaying black is more mundane - many/most monitors come today with a bug known as "dynamic contrast", "local dimming" and other such crap. What it does is if the screen is displaying black, the backlight automatically dims to make the blacks darker. With LED backlights, they can do better and do local dimming where black parts of the screen are dimmed. When you're displaying white, the backlight is pumped brighter, giving a brighter white.

That's how they accomplish those huge contrast ratios - it is, after all, a measure of black to white. Set the backlight at the middle setting (so it can go up or down equally), and measure an all-white picture (the monitor basically maxes the backlight) and an all-black picture (monitor turns backlight off), and boom, 30,000:1 or higher ratios. The backlight is still one of the largest consumers of power, so displaying white consumes more power by having the backlight cranked to max, while black consumes least by having it basically off.

The downside to this, of course, is lack of contrast in the dimmed areas. So that bright contrasty thing in the sea of darkness turns into a dim grey spot.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if I believe that at face value... Dynamic contrast ratio would seem to be a factor, since even conventional LCD backlights can be dimmed by DC on modern screens. It isn't so much that I can't believe that a typical screen would use less power at white, but the fact that the article doesn't address these questions, nor is very rigorous really give me much confidence that it applies to the real world across most monitors used.

All I know is that I want to cockpunch those green-tards behind blackle and similar.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was my first reaction too, but this is a notebook, so it would be very reasonable for him to be encrypting its storage. That's where the CPU might come in. I'd still expect even a very-low end CPU to encrypt much faster than any disk IO, though. (I know my Atom is much faster than USB2.) I've gotta be wrong about something... what is it? Yeah, maybe the system is just plain broken.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[RollingThunder]

You may also want to watch the short video on LCDs put out recently by the Engineer Guy. Really explains and demonstrates it quite well.

http://www.engineerguy.com/videos.htm

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel would disagree with you. They think that the most power-efficient way to get things done is to ramp everything up to full, complete the work as quickly as possible, then go back to sleep.

http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/applications-power-management/race-to-idle.php

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[geekoid]

you do know that was all ana rgument in favor of Win7, right? It's probably throttle because the processor is overheating.

With windows, you never would have noticed. Of course the term 'weak CPU' is pretty meaningless.

Your last argument is, of course, a strawman.

" It won't let me."
I think you mean:
"I don't know how."

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[snadrus]

Power consumption is usually compared per unit of work, meaning a good test stops measuring power when the routine is done.
So if you use half the power at any given time, but it takes more than 2x longer, then you used more power for that unit of work.

Considering that, Linux may have used less power doing your copy.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you've got an internal drive, a SATA interface, the system bus, the USB interface and the external drive. The bottleneck is going to be that slower external drive, capable of, what, 10 MB/s? Each second, assuming no DMA, the core is going to copy 2.5 million words twice, so we have something on the order of 10 million operations. This is running on a core that can do on the order of one billion operations.

You should be seeing a few percent CPU usage from this, not two cores maxed out.

(Wooo! Lookit how much battery life you get with dumb single threaded code!)

An asynchronous file copy is pretty much a pool of buffers; you tell your source device to fill a buffer when one becomes available, and your destination device to empty a buffer as soon as it's filled. Since all of the system calls return immediately, it all runs in one thread. The only way to really use more cores is to have more devices. A disk just can't read and write to two places at once.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[b4dc0d3r]

A lot of that power may be because about:blank is stored as a resource in ieframe.dll (depending on your version).

Rendering a white screen involves opening a file, reading a resource, and using a template/parser engine to render it. Other browsers just set a rectangle and draw on it, maybe loading some resources directly from their executable image which is probably already in memory since it's right next to the navigation buttons and menus.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think file transfers should use 100% of the CPU, that's a disk-write limited operation, not CPU limited.

Re:Tail wagging the dog?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might be right - what I observe when using linux on my laptops is, that the fans are almost always on full spped, making noise and drainig the battery like crazy. Working in any Windows version is much quieter. I couldn't figure out the reason so far. But your idea of intense multi threading in linux could well be the reason.

tags?!

[Anonymous Coward]

An article about IE's power consumption has been tagged with chrome and firefox but not internetexplorer?

If you can't compete...

[MojoRilla]

If you can't compete on innovation, and you can't compete by bullying standards bodies, and you can't compete by leveraging your monopoly, and you can't compete on performance, and you can't compete on security....well, at least you can say you use less power.

And yes, when you work for the same company that wrote the freaking operating system, one would hope that IE would use the least amount of power.

Whatever.

Re:If you can't compete...

[Colonel Korn]

If you can't compete on innovation, and you can't compete by bullying standards bodies, and you can't compete by leveraging your monopoly, and you can't compete on performance, and you can't compete on security....well, at least you can say you use less power.

And yes, when you work for the same company that wrote the freaking operating system, one would hope that IE would use the least amount of power.

Whatever.

It's a little distressing that this is currently +4 Insightful. It seems rather off topic, considering that even sites like Apple-friendly Ars Technica have declared IE9 the best current browser and IE9 is neck and neck with Chrome for the performance crown and those two browsers are tied for most secure, as well.

That said, I use FF because of addons.

Re:If you can't compete...

[kangsterizer]

i use FF because of that: http://www.mozilla.org/about/manifesto

but it's also one of the best performing browser overall, and has excellent add-ons, so it's all good.

Re:If you can't compete...

[Anonymous Coward]

considering that even sites like Apple-friendly Ars Technica have declared IE9 the best current browser

No, the Microsoft person at Ars said IE9 is the "the most modern browser" of those released, not the best. And, it was a week before FF4 was released, so FF4 wasn't even compared to it.

Ars has yet to compare the latest browsers in performance. They said they'd do an article, but it hasn't appeared yet.

and IE9 is neck and neck with Chrome for the performance crown

Not true, different performance reports found different browsers were fastest - sometimes IE9, sometimes FF4, sometimes Chrome. There is no clear fastest browser or two fastest browsers anymore.

Re:If you can't compete...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Tor project would disagree and they solely deal with security and anonymity. They say Firefox is the safer browser. Not any of those. In fact they say Chrome is potentially dangerous. I seriously doubt Internet Explorer is any better.

Re:If you can't compete...

[msauve]

New marketing slogan: "IE - We're less powerful!"

Re:If you can't compete...

[AmiMoJo]

Well, actually they do claim to be fastest too, and on some tests they are. Probably is that in normal usage they are by far the slowest, e.g. speed of opening tabs.

Re:Efficiency Features

[Anonymous Coward]

It can >

Give me a moment...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Power consumption. That's why we don't support modern features: efficiency!

That's the ticket!

Re:Efficiency Features

[pushing-robot]

Use the HTML entity &gt; to get >, &lt; for <, and so on. Slashdot accepts most common HTML entities, but alas—not unicode.

They're right

[PhrostyMcByte]

When I'm on my netbook, I want a browser that gives me the most battery life possible. Unfortunately my netbook doesn't have meaningful GPU acceleration, so their comparisons don't do much for me. Is IE9's rendering anywhere near as power-saving with software rendering? They also don't account for the battery saved in FF/Chrome by blocking intrusive graphical ads and their related javascript/flash. They also don't test real-world Javascript-heavy web apps like Gmail, or having multiple tabs open/opening at once.

The graphs also blow the differences out of proportion. The Chrome/FF/IE numbers are all within 15% of each-other most of the time, while the graphs make IE9 sometimes appear with a very wide lead of half the power usage.

Re:They're right

[Anonymous Coward]

The graphs have their origin at idle power consumption rather than 0. That's actually pretty reasonable, measuring the differences caused by the browsers themselves.

Re:They're right

[Anonymous Coward]

There are features for that such as hibernation/sleep and throttling. Power usage at the application level isn't really relevant, especially for an active user application like these desktop browsers.
They should be measuring power usage for mobile browsers.

The only relevant point they made in the article was that Opera lowered the timer resolution, which prevents the CPU from entering low power states. Opera should probably address this.

But this does bring up an interesting idea. Could there be a niche for a browser that by design consumes less power? Perhaps the current popular browsers could be branched into "Netbook" editions? This seems to be especially relevant for something like Chrome OS.

Re:They're right

[kripkenstein]

They also don't account for the battery saved in FF/Chrome by blocking intrusive graphical ads and their related javascript/flash.

Yes, this is huge. AdBlock/FlashBlock can save a lot of power.

They also don't test real-world Javascript-heavy web apps like Gmail

Very true. I'd expect the browsers with the fastest JS engines, Chrome and Firefox, to be better there, since faster JS engines means scripts complete faster, and the CPU is used for less time.

Re:They're right

[fermion]

I think what we want is best efficiency we can get What that means is that we get the best value from power consumed. For example, we can get much better fuel economy from driving slower, 70 mph might consume quite a bit more fuel as 50 mph, but that does not always mean we want the double nickel limit. We might want to trade fuel for time. Likewise we might get 10 extra minutes of life by using IE, but what does it matter if we get the exact same or less work done?

Also, this reminds me of the days when MS would not release the full interrupts for MS DOS.It appeared to many of us that they kept the fast system calls hidden so they always had the fasest product. The way the report is worded, it seems the speed comes from MS Windows 7, which is designed to work well with IE, and perhaps does not play well with others.

Perhaps if one is worried about power and conservation, one should ge a MacBook, with adapters from 45 to 85 watts, much less than the average pc.

Re:They're right

[Bengie]

One of the IE blogs that I read a while back said IE9 looks at current power modes and adjusts javascript timings. So if you're running on the battery, it will cause some of the async timer based calls to wait a few milliseconds longer to reduce calls being made in general. Even if Chrome is 10% faster, if IE9 makes JS calls 50% less, there will be a power savings.

I have no idea how often a modern "web 2.0" site makes timer based JS calls. But it makes sense. If you're trying to save power, wait 10ms instead of 5ms, or what have you.

Re:They're right

[msauve]

"I want a browser that gives me the most battery life possible."

You want to use Lynx, then.

Re:They're right

[Vegemeister]

It's called Lynx.

Re:They're right

[Max Romantschuk]

If you code, you could consider automating a empirical test with Selenium: http://seleniumhq.org/

Set it up to browse the sites you use the most, and simply run it until the battery dies. Rinse and repeat with other browsers.

A hassle to implement, though...

Re:They're right

[shutdown -p now]

IE9 actually includes ad blocking, it's just renamed such that you wouldn't know what it does. It's called a "tracking protection list", and is described primarily as a privacy tool, but in practice it can (and is) used to block ads as well.

Re:They're right

[buddyglass]

An extra 15% consumption is significant when we're talking about battery life.

Re:They're right

[RewriteQuran]

Tune your system as per http://lesswatts.org/tips/graphics.php
And move along.

Re:They're right

[perryizgr8]

ie9 is also pretty fast at js now, at least in synthetic benchmarks like sunspider etc.

Re:Efficiency Features

[tepples]

Either make a > sign with &gt;, or set your Comment Post Mode to "Extrans".

Re:Special characters

[JesseMcDonald]

Since when could slashdot not show a greater than symbol?

Um... when did Slashdot support greater-than characters in comments? Try the HTML entity, &gt; (>). You may also be interested in less-than (&lt;) and ampersand (&amp;). Others can be found here.

Wow..

[Anonymous Coward]

talk about reaching for straws o_O

Goals, not real projections

[Anonymous Coward]

This is simply goals for the WP7 team. Nobody can truly project out that far with information available today, there are simply too many variables, companies, and people involved. Good for them, go big or go home.

Who did the testing?

[Anonymous Coward]

IT'S A TRAP!

Posting on a M$ blog about an M$ product? Don't you believe it.

What the hell?

[MrEricSir]

A browser is a piece of software, and to say that it "consumes" power is a very strange way to think about it.

The amount of power being used depends on the hardware. If you want to reduce your power, get a computer that's more efficient, and don't worry about your browser at all.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. If I write crappy software that hits your laptop's disc every 10ms, is the laptop the inefficient part? The hardware guys need to invent better speculative laptop disc caching technology? Of course software can consume too much power.

Re:What the hell?

[kdsible]

although i agree with your statement - bloatware can suck a battery pretty good.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

If a browser pulls a constant 50% on the CPU and another browser pulls 10%, then yes, one will use less power.

*numbers pulled from my ass.

Re:What the hell?

[mysidia]

Wrong. If I write crappy software that hits your laptop's disc every 10ms, is the laptop the inefficient part? The hardware guys need to invent better speculative laptop disc caching technology? Of course software can consume too much power.

No... the OS guys (or the OEM/admin that prepared the software install) are responsible for causing a mechanical disk to unnecessarily be hit every 10m by the browser's predictable activities.

If the browser is genuinely inefficient and performs many unnecessary operations, the browser will also be slower. Hitting the disk every 10m incurs a performance penalty.

Re:What the hell?

[guspasho]

The amount of power your hardware uses is not constant, it depends on what you run on it. If you run something that's CPU-intensive then your CPU will consume more power than otherwise.

The power rating on your PSU is not constant, it does not suck the rated power at all times and waste the unused portion as heat. The rating is a maximum.

That said, considering all the power wasted by an OS like Windows and whatever other programs you may have resident in RAM for convenience's sake, and plug-ins like Flash that are ubiquitous even on netbooks, measuring the difference in a browser's power consumption is probably laughable.

Re:What the hell?

[increment1]

Software can have a large impact on power consumption because, quite simply, your hardware consumes less power when it does less. So giving your system more work requires more power.

There are many reasons for this, from the architecture of modern CPUs to memory and disk usage. If you use a program that is inefficient and takes more operations (say O(N) vs O(2^N)) then power will be wasted, regardless of what hardware it is executing on.

Re:What the hell?

[CosmeticLobotamy]

Hitting the disk every 10m incurs a performance penalty.

Not necessarily. If nothing else is using the disk and you spawn a thread to do nothing but sleep 10ms, seek to a semi-random spot on the disk, and write "Hey, hard drive, what's up?" you will have no noticeable performance problems until something else needs the drive.

You could do nonsense math in a loop in a background thread, which in a multi-core system would heat the processor up good and toasty without any real performance hit as long as the other 3 cores are idle.

Neither of those would actually ever happen, but functionally equivalent operations implemented by incompetent boobs could do something similar. To a lesser extent, even a competent programmer, knowing that normally there's a ton of computational power to spare, might not give a dang that his function is sucking up 20% more CPU than it needs to.

Re:What the hell?

[MrEricSir]

I have a laptop that's just fine with 65 watts, and a desktop that barely gets by with 750 watts.

It's not the software that sucks down the power; it's the hard drives and graphics card.

Re:What the hell?

[Goaway]

Your graphics card will not be sucking down power unless you run software that actually uses it.

Re:What the hell?

[schwaang]

That said, considering all the power wasted by an OS like Windows and whatever other programs you may have resident in RAM for convenience's sake, and plug-ins like Flash that are ubiquitous even on netbooks, measuring the difference in a browser's power consumption is probably laughable.

Yeah, kinda laughable in the bigger scheme of things, BUT I have to hand it to Microsoft for their part in getting Adobe to fix a problem where Flash prevented Windows from autosleeping. That was huge energy waste when multiplied across probably millions of home PCs that would normally have been asleep for at least 12 hours a day.

What's more, that was part of a wider Microsoft effort that promotes efficiency across their products, including in data centers where a 10-15% efficiency win can really add up. So a begrudging kudos to MS on this -- and I hope FF kicks IE's lilly white hiney in every regard next go-round!

Re:What the hell?

[afidel]

Next go around? With Flashblock and AdBlock it already does in the real world, because it's doing probably 5% of the work on the real web. Same goes for Chrome, the most efficient work is the work I never have to do.

Re:What the hell?

[mariushm]

Your system doesn't really use 750 watts. Depending on the configuration it barely uses 80-150 watts on idle and when browsing the Internet and only when you play games or do some heavy stuff like video encoding, it gets close to 300 watts.

People got accustomed to power supplies with big watts number because in the past manufacturers were actually lying about how much their power supplies can "deliver" but nowadays there is very little difference in the price of components for a power supply, between let's say a 400 watts power supply and a 750 watts power supply, so it's not worth it for manufacturers to make "quality" power supplies at low wattage.

If you remove the dedicated video card and use a motherboard with integrated video with not so many overclocking features (like 8+2 vrm chips for the cpu, which cause power loss), change the processor to a dual core close to what regular laptops use and enable the power saving features, you'll get close to an average of less than 100 watts. Won't get close to the power efficiency of a laptop because the power supply is designed to get peak efficiency at about 50% of it's rated power, not at 100 watts.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, Firefox uses hardware acceleration. And, as a mobile device hardware designer, the trend is clearly towards enhanced graphics effects at the expense of battery life.

Re:What the hell?

[msauve]

"Wrong. If I write crappy software that hits your laptop's disc every 10ms, is the laptop the inefficient part?"

Yes, because you could have bought one with a SSD.

Re:What the hell?

[amliebsch]

That's just wrong. Flipping bits increases entropy. If your software is instructing the hardware to flip bits, it is instructing the hardware to consume power.

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, I am a low-power circuit designer. To give you an idea, on one of my previous designs the difference in power between idle/waiting and active/typical was 1200%.

Re:What the hell?

[SiMac]

Fortunately, using your GPU to render webpages means less load on your CPU, which means your CPU can run at a lower power mode. Also, if you render your webpage in half the time, both your GPU and CPU can go to idle faster. It's not so simple. In fact, if you look at this blog post, the fully GPU-accelerated browsers (Fx 4 and IE 9) are actually using significantly less power...

Re:What the hell?

[chocapix]

which in a multi-core system would heat the processor up good and toasty without any real performance hit as long as the other 3 cores are idle.

One, two, three, multi, five, six, ...

ecomentalists unite

[Anonymous Coward]

So if IE is going for the ecomental segment I have yet another reason not to use not to use it. Thanks M$ for making the choice that much easier :)

That picture.. my eyes! Mindfcuk!

[black3d]

OMG.. that right-hand picture.. In FF4, this end of the rack spaces are almost perfectly in line with the scrolling demarcations. Rapidly scrolling up and down makes it look 3D-esque and screws with my mind.. :O

I just hope I wasn't the only one tripped out by the visual effect. :)

Re:That picture.. my eyes! Mindfcuk!

[SammyIAm]

Gah! Well now that you mention it, yes! And now I can't unsee it!

Good thing I won't be reading the whole article =P

Re:That picture.. my eyes! Mindfcuk!

[polymeris]

You are not the only one.
I am using that effect for my next (and first) webdesign. If they didn't already patent it, that is.

The obvious...

[thestudio_bob]

Well, when you program a browser to do less than everyone else's I would assume it doesn't need as much power.

Keep it simple

[onyxruby]

Keep it simple, just disable flash in entirety. You will reduce your power consumption as flash is a poorly coded. Run the numbers with and without flash and see what a difference it makes. This is arguably one of the reasons Steve Jobs won't allow flash on the IOS...

Re:Keep it simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Plugins are irrelevant to the comparison since all a browser does is launch the plugin. Perhaps there are some small differences but I assume quite smaller that the relatively resource intensive flash plugin.

You've done better, big talker?

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject.

Re:You've done better, big talker?

[Gadget_Guy]

See subject run.

Re:You've done better, big talker?

[natehoy]

Run, subject, run.

I wonder when the day will come...

[BitterOak]

While power might seem like a minor concern, with nearly two billion people now using the Internet the worldwide implications of browser power consumption are significant.

I wonder when the day will come when the government starts mandating energy efficiency requirements in software, much the same way they do appliances, cars and other things. I wonder if such rules would apply to open source, or other freely exchanged software.

Re:I wonder when the day will come...

[DigiShaman]

How about, "it's none of their fucking business". the ONLY effing reason our industry (Information Technology) thrives is because of lack of involvement by the Feds. The last thing we need is more more government over-site dictating how best to run IT. Government and their bureaucracies will only act as a viscous substance in an already hyper-fluid environment that thrives on turn-on-a-dime change. Government would serve to be the problem, not the solution.

Re:I wonder when the day will come...

[hedwards]

I think the problem there is that it's going to vary across computers to the point that the software itself isn't really being measured. Measuring OSes for energy efficiency might be realistic, but applications that run on them would be ridiculous. Plus, the hardware components use the energy anyways, if you minimize the power usage of each component to the extent possible you'll minimize the usage of the entire computer.

Yes, that's a bit simplistic for the important aspects it's correct.

Odd argument

[MCSEBear]

Since the same computer is MUCH more power efficient running Mac OS X than running Windows, this seems to be an odd argument for Microsoft to be making.

Anandtech:

Apple claims 10 hours of battery life for the MBP13 when running OS X, and Anand hit pretty close to that mark when testing it out with his light web browsing test. Now, we’ve shown before that OS X is more optimized for mobile power consumption than all versions of Windows, so going into this test the expectations were a fair bit lower.

And for good reason; the MBP13 (running Windows 7) showed fairly similar battery life to some of the older Core 2-based systems. With it’s 63.5 Wh lithium polymer battery, the MBP hits 5.5 hours on our ideal-case battery test, and exactly 5 hours on the web browsing test. While this is decent for the average Core 2 notebook, it’s pretty woeful compared to the OS X battery life of the MBP. If you have no reason to run Windows (program compatibility, gaming, etc) you’re better off in OS X just so that you can get about double the battery life.

Re:Odd argument

[Anonymous Coward]

"Well, when you program an OS to do less than everyone else's I would assume it doesn't need as much power."

Re:Odd argument

[Anonymous Coward]

While your assertions are completely accurate it important to remember this: there is no reason why Apple would try to optimize it's hardware for use under Windows. There are many complicated power saving techniques that modern operating systems use and many of these techniques must be specially allowed by the hardware.

Re:Odd argument

[DCstewieG]

Friggin' Unix, that do-nothing OS.

Re:Odd argument

[guruevi]

Apple has pretty good support for an occasional Windows installation, all the hardware works and the drivers are stable. The hardware is just mobile Intel and a mobile ATi or nVidia card, nothing special about it, power control is done through ACPI and however the Intel cores want to be managed. I have noticed however that Windows does use a lot more power than even Linux on some machines. I guess a lot of it is in the background things that Windows does for you such as checking for a CD by sending an ATA command every second (that's why the old-style CD-ROM's blink their activity led when running Windows) instead of trusting the machine to tell the OS that something changed and a bunch of background programs that nobody needs at any random point in time (such as Remote Assistance, Security Center and other remote exploits waiting to happen.

Re:Odd argument

[scdeimos]

I guess a lot of it is in the background things that Windows does for you such as checking for a CD by sending an ATA command every second (that's why the old-style CD-ROM's blink their activity led when running Windows) instead of trusting the machine to tell the OS that something changed

Windows isn't the only thing guilty of this. Mac OS used to poll the Smartport (floppies, etc.) and SCSI devices for media changes every second even though there was hardware support for interrupts. And in something more recent: USB requires the host to regularly poll all of the connected devices to find out if they have an "interrupt" pending - go figure.

Re:Odd argument

[Americium]

This Anandtech article shows them using about the same amount of power.

Re:Odd argument

[Anonymous Coward]

The article that is about a desktop machine plugged into a wall? How is that relevant again?

Re:Odd argument

[shutdown -p now]

Apple has pretty good support for an occasional Windows installation, all the hardware works and the drivers are stable

There has been some talk about Bootcamp ACPI drivers (which are Apple's) not being all that good - which would affect battery life. Without source for either the drivers or Windows, no-one can say for sure.

a bunch of background programs that nobody needs at any random point in time (such as Remote Assistance, Security Center and other remote exploits waiting to happen.

Background programs don't drain battery if they sit in idle waiting for some event (I/O on a socket or a pipe etc).

I have noticed however that Windows does use a lot more power than even Linux on some machines.

For the most part, laptops with Linux do worse with battery than same exact laptops with Windows (Google is your friend here). Reason isn't so much the OS itself, but rather ACPI drivers again.

Re:Odd argument

[Anonymous Coward]

You would have to show at least one non-MacBook running OS X with much longer battery life than the same non-MacBook running Windows before you could draw the conclusion that the OS X operating system is more efficient than Windows.

As it stands, I'm inclined to believe that the drivers are at fault.

Re:Odd argument

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this isn't really true. It is simply much easier to make your software efficient when you also manufacture the hardware and write the drivers for the hardware. Very easy.
 
Kind of like how M$'s browser is the most power efficient on computers running M$'s operating system.

Can I please PLEASE ask the editors

[Anonymous Coward]

NEVER to post stories that link to companies' PR releases? I don't care if it's Microsoft, Google or Mozilla, I think it's quite evident that these comparisons are all very biased (and in two days you'll have similar comparisons from the other browser makers with exactly the opposite results).

Deceitful graph

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone notice that the battery life graph had the Y axis set to 2 hours? The difference in battery life was exaggerated by this piece of deceit.

Re:Deceitful graph

[scdeimos]

So you missed all of the Total Power Consumption graphs then - their Y axes ranged from 10 to 15-26 watts.

Re:Efficiency Features

[Anonymous Coward]

1 and 2 are redundant. If it's not working right, it's not working!

mobile vs pc

[alphatel]

This is why you need to build a "mobile web browser" as opposed to just a "browser". This is why Myriad, Isis and Polarity browsers were bought out - they provide a specific function for a select group of devices at the right power level with plenty of functionality.
There's simply no way to put IE9 on most devices and expect anything pleasant to happen to your battery.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

lowest power consumption browser ... evah

[thrillseeker]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Blank.gif

... functionality to follow real soon now

Bar graphs aren't zeroed

[Anonymous Coward]

The second comment makes a very good point about the bar graphs.

For the record, the fact that you're using bar charts that don't line up zero means that those charts are in fact very misleading. Because the power consumption charts start at 10 W, differences as little as 5% look like nearly 100% differences. Int the about:blank example alone, it's scaled to show opera consuming over 93% more power, while the raw data and even the accompanying text show that it only consumes a little over 5% more than IE9. In the battery life chart at the end, the origin is 2 hours, which makes a 38% increase in battery life look like closer to a 150% increase in battery life.

Sure, you could make the argument that people should read the accompanying text and data, but the entire point of using charts and graphs is to provide the data in a consumable way that doesn't require the use of the accompanying text. Someone skimming this article and moving on to other things is likely to be completely misinformed by these charts. I'm not sure if it's just a simple oversight, an attempt at making them more "interesting" or deliberate misinformation, but it makes me severely distrust the quality of the rest of the experiment over all. Poor form, Microsoft. Poor form.

Possting anonymously not to whore karma.

Re:Bar graphs aren't zeroed

[Anonymous Coward]

The reply to that comment explains the relevence of starting at 10W:

[quote]you complain about the linging up of the bar charts.

However the bar charts line up with 10 W which is almost equal to the idle power usage.

So the bar charts very indicative for the extra powoerusage related to the browserinstance.

Which is exactly what you would want to know.[/quote]

Posting anonymously to not be a karma whore.

Re:Bar graphs aren't zeroed

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, the Y-axis is quite clearly marked with the Wattage. If people are too lazy and inattentive to even read the damn data on the chart then I don't see why we should pander to them.

Anyhow, the bar graphs in the article are perfectly justified in using a 10 Watt baseline; we are interested in the browser's power consumption over the level of the idle system, not the system's power consumption as a whole.

IE integration in Windows

[dingen]

What's the situation on IE integration in Windows these days? Is it still true that IE is really kind of always running when you start up Windows, like it was in Windows 98 or XP? If so... could you say that running just IE is more power efficient than running other browsers along with it?

Re:IE integration in Windows

[afidel]

It's still integrated, but Trident isn't doing much most of the time and it's just a very small part of the web version of IE.

Re:IE integration in Windows

[shutdown -p now]

It's integrated in the same sense as WebKit is integrated in OS X - it's a stock system library, and various parts of stock UI use it when they need to render HTML (help system, for example). It's not "always running" in a sense that there is some kind of background IE process. It does mean that IE will likely cold start faster, simply because some other stock application (most likely Explorer) would have already loaded the engine DLL, and so it's cached in memory.

Re:Efficiency Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so. I've often driven a car that runs rough, so I'd work on it and make it run smooth. Hence the phrase, "tune up."

Linux?

[Charliemopps]

They completely missed the fact that the only browser in their list which requires Windows is IE9. I'm guessing that ANY of the browsers would beat IE9 hands down if it were running on linux instead of Windows 7.

Re:Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

good point

Re:Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

They completely missed the fact that the only browser in their list which requires Windows is IE9. I'm guessing that ANY of the browsers would beat IE9 hands down if it were running on linux instead of Windows 7.

Of course not. Linux lacks LOTS of drivers needed for proper power management, due to fu**ing manufactures with d*mn closed specs. My battery lasts 2 times more in Windows than Linux, despite lower memory and CPU consumption.

Re:Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

...and my netbook runs for 1.5 hours longer running Linux, vs Windows.

orange, meet apple.

Re:Linux?

[Americium]

Ubuntu uses more power than Windows.

Re:Linux?

[judeancodersfront]

Post the specs.

Re:Linux?

[shutdown -p now]

...and my netbook runs for 1.5 hours longer running Linux, vs Windows.

You should stop running WinME on it, then it won't BSOD that fast. ~

Re:Linux?

[Charliemopps]

Yes, 1 version of 1 distro out of hundreds uses more power than Win7 IF you have brand new video card from a manufacturer that puts out shitty linux drivers so the power managements not up to par. But you don't need a $300, brand new video card to run a browser do you? No.

Re:Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so sure, if you're rigorous IE9 can't run on Linux, so it can't consume any power on Linux, so it ought to be the less power hungry :)

Or to put it an other way, with IE9 on a Linux laptop you get infinite browsing time, but you can't browse anything...

PS: this very clever (indeed) rhetorical argument also applies to XP !!

Re:Linux?

[Americium]

Any $100 or more video card has flash support and uses very little power when playing hd flash. In linux it pins my CPU since there is a lack of hardware support.

Re:Efficiency Features

[Garble Snarky]

1. make it compile
2. make it work
3. make it fast

Compare the Power consumption of web pages.

[drolli]

There are certain flash ads on some web pages which make the fan of my laptop turn on. There are also badly written javascripts which do the same - for essenrially doing nothing.

Re:Compare the Power consumption of web pages.

[White Flame]

Then why don't you block them?

Re:Compare the Power consumption of web pages.

[drolli]

I do for my normal surfing. But sometimes i use another browser/machine to test sth and my usual set of extensions to make the web bearable is not installed.

Re:Compare the Power consumption of web pages.

[Anonymous Coward]

This can also be seen rather dramatically with a flash ad on the side of a page with a cpu "meter" running in Windows or Linux - move the page so that ad goes offscreen and watch the cpu drop dramatically. CPU=POWER with any such scenario no matter what OS/browser combo is used.

Re:awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

Well yes, but Microsoft has the best tools for developers bar none. It's head and shoulders above the rest, especially for Win Phone 7.

It doesn't matter to me.

[pro151]

Google is Skynet and I am a Google Borg unit. I have not used IE (Internet Excuses) since FF came out. Now it is Chrome all the way. I wish Google would have accepted my passioned plea to have been one of their testers on the Chrome LT. I am Droid X, My Wife is Droid X, my Son is Droid. Skynet has taken over my entire house and family.

Re:It doesn't matter to me.

[Archangel Michael]

You named your son "Droid" ... dang, my hat's off to you my geek friend.

Re:It doesn't matter to me.

[shutdown -p now]

I am Droid X, My Wife is Droid X, my Son is Droid.

So, how much did you pay Lucas for the license?

Re:It doesn't matter to me.

[Logic and Reason]

These aren't the Droids you're looking for.

Re:It doesn't matter to me.

[shutdown -p now]

They are precisely the droids, in fact - so much so that Moto had to get a license to use the name.

Meaningless test

[Anubis IV]

All of these tests appear to have been done with a wired LAN setup, but power consumption matters most when you're mobile, and the power draw from Wi-Fi will far outstrip the draw from any browser in typical usage. Who cares which browser is more power efficient if the technology you need to access the Internet in the first place draws several orders of magnitude more power?

Re:Meaningless test

[Prikolist]

Good point. And in that case, Opera would be miles ahead as it caches pages without reloading any data for them when you use back/forward buttons.

Re:Meaningless test

[shutdown -p now]

Opera used to be the only browser which did so... a few years ago. They can all do that trick now.

Power consumption: the HTML screenplay

[Anonymous Coward]

{inquisitive commercial voice}
If we really wanted to optimize power consumption, wouldn't we blindly stick to simple text-over-the-web?
{/inquisitive commercial voice}

{commercial authoritative voice}
NO! We homo sapiens have complex needs and wants that do not simply conform to plain text. Let us consume RICH MEDIA!! {br}
Windows 7 PERFORMS BETTER than any other version of windows, and it takes MORE ENERGY to do so!!! {br}{hr}
MORE is BETTER!!!!
{/commercial authoritative voice}

{cue to an excited actor-CEO leading a chant}
MORE-elopers!!!!! {b}MORE-elopers!!!!!!{/b}{b}{i}MORE-elopers!!!!!!!{/i}{/b}
{/cue to an excited actor-CEO leading a chant}

{cue to an actor-nerd, sitting in the basement, which is really a soundstage, typing on his workstation, which is really just a monitor and keyboard hooked up to an iPad, inexplicably the Mac Apple glow emanates from the side of the monitor}.
I have come up with a power-friendly optimization for my browser. The WORLD is my OYSTER!!!!!!!! {!--Steven, this is an in joke because nerds don't get to see many "oysters," if you know what I mean--}
{/cue to an actor-nerd, sitting in the basement, which is really a soundstage, typing on his workstation, which is really just a monitor and keyboard hooked up to an iPad, inexplicably the Mac Apple glow emanates from the side of the monitor}.

{fade to black}
{!--{/fade to black} wait, this doesn't make any sense. How do we resolve this?--}

What about their OS hardware requirements???

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, MS should focus on their OS instead of trying to wage war in the browser space when it comes to power consumption. With solaris zones or openvz containers, I can run hundreds of servers on a relatively small piece of hardware, as compared to ESX with Windows VM's, which are resource hogs. Now, if you look at the consumer desktop space, MS has the lions share of desktops, which now require 4gb+ of memory, 4 cores, etc. just to run the OS. All that extra processing power and memory put a heavy tax on the power requirements of the desktop, whereas I can run linux or BSD and it requires a fraction (small fraction) of the cpu power just to sit idle. If they really cared about power they would put their money where their mouth is and focus on something that has the potential to make a much larger dent in the bucket (their power hungry OS) and stop in their shameless self-promotion in the browser space.

Why is "being green" always bathed in sanctimony?

[swb]

responsibly lead the industry in power requirements.

Why is being energy efficient so frequently expressed in the most ingratiating and sanctimonious terms? I like using less power, too, but I'm not going to pretend for a minute that it makes me a more moral and deserving human being.

I think like most geeks, getting more work done with less energy input is inherently valuable -- at a minimum your batteries last longer. But I can't help but want to waste energy when energy efficiency becomes a question of faith, and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people who would otherwise find great appeal in what essentially amounts to getting more for less are turned off by it as well.

Load of Bollocks.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the browser that determines "efficiency", it is the PLUGINS. And this is a lesson that Linux has taught me through hell and high water.

The prime culprit: Adobe's god damned FLASH plugin. Doing very little, this stupid plugin will drive my CPU usage through the roof. Even sitting idle. CPU usage == fan working overtime == battery life. And this goes for every plugin but I guaranTEE you...FLASH is the primary culprit.

So, battery efficiency basically comes down to how the web browser deals with plugins. Opera is horrible...that god damned operapluginwrapper executable continues to linger consuming HUGE amounts of RAM and CPU. They continue to ignore this at their own peril. However Chrome has a different approach. With Opera, I have to continually watch my CPU load and kill the stupid flash plugin. With Chrome, I close the tab. Boom, it goes away. MUCH better design.

I can't comment on IE9, but I will guarantee that any claims of efficiency come down SOLELY on how IE9 deals with plugins. Nothing else. And FLASH is the biggest CPU-draining battery-sucking piece of SHIT there is.

Conditions Apply..

[tvpmdude]

That OS will not crash during the test .

Install Ad / flash blocker

[Anonymous Coward]

And increase batteri time by 30%

Cannot beat my browser

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody can beat my browser for memory efficiency or power consumption. It may not score the best on Acid tests, but we all know those tests aren't indicators of real-world performance. I've appended the source code here (see, it's also open-source!):

int main(int argc, char *argv[]) { return 0; }

Re:awesome

[mug funky]

time to trade in your HBGary Astroturf license. this one's failed.

Try Youtube

[omni123]

They really should try flash heavy sites like YouTube.

I can have my battery life cut in half when using Chrome 10 on YouTube; so much so that I actually have to switch back to Firefox for extended browsing when I'm on the road. It's pretty poor because even if the video has stopped and it becomes an idle page it can still sit at 10-15+% while doing absolutely nothing (so I don't see how they can claim rendering speed is the cause).

Re:Try Youtube

[tlhIngan]

They really should try flash heavy sites like YouTube.

I can have my battery life cut in half when using Chrome 10 on YouTube; so much so that I actually have to switch back to Firefox for extended browsing when I'm on the road. It's pretty poor because even if the video has stopped and it becomes an idle page it can still sit at 10-15+% while doing absolutely nothing (so I don't see how they can claim rendering speed is the cause).

It's the plugin architecture, and Flash itself. Plugins get periodic callbacks from the browser to let them do something. Flash itself is probably polling something or other while it's waiting (and YouTube is fetching new recommendatoins and all that stuff in the background).

It's stuff outside of the browser's control (the only thing the browser can do is simply send these callbacks slower, but if it's playing video or animation this will cause it to stutter). It's one thing HTML5 can improve over Flash since the browser can determine if it's playing a video or idle waiting to play, or if the animation is running or stopped and other optimizations (e.g., if the animation isn't visible, stop animating but continue audio playback - you can't stop sending callbacks to plugins as many people background flash-based music streamers and video players).

Re:Try Youtube

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried switching YouTube to HTML 5?

Re:Try Youtube

[perryizgr8]

and have a shitty video experience?

0.25 watts? Seriously?

[scdeimos]

What type of memory are they using in a useful working computer system that only draws 0.257 watts?

Dear Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Browsers don't consume power, CPUs do. If you're unable to make even that distinction, you will fail. Who uses IE anyways?

But IE9 runs only on bloated Windows...

[QuietLagoon]

IE9 currently is confined to Windows Vista and Windows 7, the two most bloated, power-hungry versions of Windows around. Maybe Microsoft should start telling the billions of computer users to ditch Microsoft Windows and move over to a more efficient, less resource-hungry, operating system.

Re:But IE9 runs only on bloated Windows...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Windows 7 is the most efficient version of windows, and all versions of windows are very power efficient.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2840/3

Re:But IE9 runs only on bloated Windows...

[GORby_]

You silly boy, you :-)
Win7 is playing nice with the U4100 in my laptop, which consumes between 5,5 and 8W during light loads, while being quite fast (boot time, application load time, search, ... the U4100 isn't going to be a great performer on CPU intensive tasks, no matter what...).

Light loads can be defined as reading and writing mail, documents, ... surfing the web (no heavy DHTML/flash stuff).

Re:But IE9 runs only on bloated Windows...

[Anonymous Coward]

Has much as I am an avid Linux user/fan (the only time I use windows is XP at work like now) anecdotal evidence has led me to believe that windows (at least XP) can consume somewhat less power than Linux...

But I don't think this is due to excessive bloat on a system or the other, it's more likely caused by different hardware drivers that implement different power saving strategies (or lack thereof), especially with the most critical parts (like GFX / screen / cpu).

Re:But IE9 runs only on bloated Windows...

[snadrus]

Did they mention if they had antivirus running?

Re:But IE9 runs only on bloated Windows...

[Lemmingue]

[CITATION NEEDED]

No, I'm not new here.

Re:But IE9 runs only on bloated Windows...

[Anonymous Coward]

Would like to see Puppy vs. Windows 7 ...

Tests are a bit off the mark, I think.

[RobbieThe1st]

Testing about:blank is one thing, but how about typical usage: At least three sites displaying different sites. As it is, we're testing the effeciency of the rest of the browser framework as much as anything, whereas with several heavy tabs running, you'd be able to test how well it scales up to normal workloads.
Also, it would have been nice to see power consuption graphs for running a Youtube video(flash vs webm vs x264) in the various browsers, using plugins as needed. I mean, a very common web usage scenario is playing one or more youtube videos in a row. Running a JS benchmark? Once or twice a year max for most people.

Also, I see their graphs as showing Firefox winning. IE doesn't even count; It doesn't run cross platorm(Windows, OSX, X-based Linux at least).

What I want to know, however, is how to -increase- consumption for better performance: Sure, on a laptop you want battery life, but on your big honking desktop? I'd take performance over effeciency any day - I've got plenty of spare cycles it can use.

Does anyone else find this highly suspect?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone else find these tests highly suspect? It wasn't so long ago that Microsoft was caught with their hand in the cookie jar by dead-coding a very specific loop in a very specific benchmark. After lots of testing the community over at reddit (and others I assume) managed to give convincing evidence that it was, indeed, targeted at that specific loop, as the exact same setup with different variable names (even, if I remember right, different *whitespacing*) didn't cause the same dead-code opt-out.

Now they are trying to pull out power testing in a very limited environment. They cached a 'major news site' (msnbc.com anyone), then used two benchmark tests that are blatantly written by Microsoft and Friends to be IE friendly (having IE in the name is kind of a dead give away). Does this completely invalidate the benchmarks? No. Does this mean that we should crown IE the most power efficient? Not on your life. In fact, as far as I can tell, these tests mean... nothing. Naught. Bupkis. Null. Zilch. Squat.

When we have an even moderately independent source who wants to do this testing, I'm willing to perk up and listen. I use a laptop for 99% of all the computer work I do and would love to know which is most power friendly. But I'll be damned if I just take Microsoft's word for it.

Flash

[Okonomiyaki]

I'd have liked to see pages that specifically use flash heavily (youtube or some kind of flash-based game) compared here too. I've noticed that Flash in Chrome causes my fan to spin up like crazy. Other browsers, not quite so much.

Make it Not Crash and Not Leak Memory

[billstewart]

Mozilla Firefox is crashing almost daily for me, between full crashes and times that it leaks enough memory that it hits 1.5GB and stops responding, or burns the whole CPU core and nearly stops responding. Firefox 4.0 is a bit better than FF3.x - at least sometimes when it crashes it's not burning the whole CPU, or not leaking all the memory it can get. There's really no bloody excuse for it - you'd think this was the 20th century or something, and we knew better back then too.

I've moved about half my work over to Google Chrome, though there are things that don't work reliably on Chrome and information that I don't trust Google with. Occasionally it'll crash and turn all the pages into "Oh, Snap!", especially for random news sites like you get by opening up everything in FARK in separate tabs. One other important difference between Chrome and Firefox is that Chrome splits things up into more processes, so damage is a little better contained, but there's no easy way to say "kill ALL the Google Chrome, restart and restore all the pages" the way there is with Firefox.

IE7 has been reliable, and at least it has tabs, but it's pretty lame and doesn't give me all the ad-blocking script-blocking protection that the other browsers do, so I only trust it for a few work-related pages and a few pages that are IE-specific and fail on other browsers.

Re:Make it Not Crash and Not Leak Memory

[hairyfeet]

I've had the same problem with FF since the 3.6.xx branch, and it don't seem to be any better on FF 4. I have a little Sempron nettop I use for daily browsing as it uses almost no power and is whisper quiet and after 3 to 4 hours FF will suck up all 1.5Gb of RAM and start hitting the swap.

That is just unacceptable in this day and age, so I've decided to switch to Comodo Dragon which if you don't trust Chrome or want the phoning home junk maybe you ought to try. It is based on Chromium, has some really nice security features like domain validation and the option to use Comodo DNS if you like, and unlike FF when I close tabs I get the memory they were using back, and has the ability to run all the Chrome extensions like ABP and ForecastFox. So give it a try, it is 100% free, runs good, and seems to be pretty solid.

As for TFA while I'm glad MSFT is improving IE, simply because so many use it so improvements to IE power consumption will have a big impact, frankly if it only used a single watt I wouldn't touch IE with a 50 foot pole. After spending years cleaning up the mess that was IE 6 thanks to MSFT just walking away and leaving all those users boned I'm afraid I just can't bring myself to use it. Fool me once and all that. Funny though how much Opera blows through on startup, I thought Presto was supposed to be pretty light?

Re:Make it Not Crash and Not Leak Memory

[darrylo]

If you're using FF4 and gmail, there's a known issue (which might also be in FF3.6) where lots of memory are consumed: Bug 497808. On my system, I can start up a pristine FF4 installation, open one tab on my gmail account, and FF4 will be sucking up 1-2GB of private space (win7 x64) after a day or so (leaving it open, not minimized). From the comments, it might be a gmail bug.

Let's hope it gets addressed soon.

Re:Make it Not Crash and Not Leak Memory

[mcvos]

I had no problems with FF 3.6.13, but it keeps updating automatically to .14, .15 and .16, and those all freeze regularly. I thought Firefox left these kind of stability issues behind it years ago. What happened?

Re:Make it Not Crash and Not Leak Memory

[GooberToo]

Mozilla Firefox is crashing almost daily for me, between full crashes and times that it leaks enough memory that it hits 1.5GB and stops responding

Perhaps you should stop blaming your browser for what is extremely likely a Flash problem. Frankly, your entire post is so contradictory to the vast majority of user experiences, it smacks of trolling and/or turfing.

Hell, I'm running the same FF 4.0 instance since release day, have over 50 tabs open in five frames, have numerous add-ons installed, including flash, and only have ~800M in use. The latest FF is super reliable, extremely fast and responsive, and based on my results, very frugal with memory. It easily, for me, has a 200-300M smaller foot print than FF 3.x.

Seriously, your claims just don't seem credible in the least.

Re:Make it Not Crash and Not Leak Memory

[GooberToo]

From the comments, it might be a gmail bug.

Its more than likely is a gmail bug. And that, sadly, is the basis of most of these reports. All too often, people who have no idea what they are doing blame the application closest to them for their problems. Many, many stability and memory footprint issues which are commonly blamed on the browser are frequently add-on and plugin issues. Flash is one of the more common plugins which creates stability and memory issues but people are happy to ignore that, despite it being extremely well known, and blame what they see - FF.

It may be that what you guys are talking about actually is a FF bug, but based on the false error rate attributed to firefox, chances are extremely high, its not a FF bug.

Re:Make it Not Crash and Not Leak Memory

[Luckyo]

This is typed out on 3.6.16 that has been running for at least 48 hours straight (actual usage time), survived at least 4 system hibernations, a shit ton of flash (I had a friend with a severe flash game fetish visiting yesterday) and a whole lot of general usage including running on background while I was playing DA2 and alt-tabbing in and out to check on dragon age wiki.

May I suggest that there may be something outside the actual program that's causing the crashes, such as operating system or bad add-ons?

Re:Make it Not Crash and Not Leak Memory

[hairyfeet]

Kinda doubt it, as in my case we are talking four, count them four, different machines with THREE different OSes, in this case XP32, XP64, and Windows 7.

Now considering all four machines and all three OSes have completely different CPUs/GPUs/HDDs AND software? I kinda doubt your works for me (TM) in this case. May I suggest that perhaps YOU have just gotten lucky? After all if we want to share anecdotes I have one customer for whom Vista runs great and even have a single person who loves and still uses WinME daily, but that don't make either one great products.

But since I've seen this problem on S754 Sempron,S478 P4, S775 Pentium Dual, S-AM2+ Phenom II, I can say it isn't the arch, and I've seen it as I've said on 3 different OSes so no goal there, and the extensions I use are the pretty universal ABP and ForecastFox, so no dice. My guess is they have a fundamental leak somewhere in the Gecko engine started in 3.6.xx that is tripped quite easily, condition for trip unknown but possibly due to the new plugin sandbox as I have noticed it will NOT give back RAM after playing videos in tabs.

Re:Make it Not Crash and Not Leak Memory

[Luckyo]

It's worth noting that I address this across three different XP machines. One is the one I'm typing this out on which is a core duo wintel, other is my somewhat old turion laptop which I only reboot when windows update asks for it and try to never turn off firefox unless it crashes because I have a shit ton of pugins which make startup quite a bit slow on a 1GB RAM with a reall slow 5200 rpm hard drive. And last is an ancient machine I gave to my parents which kind of has to be hibernated, it only has 512MB of RAM, an old athlon and a slow hard drive, making start up and shut down speed atrocious. On which I also told them not to restart firefox unless they have to, the base machine is kind of crap and start up times on software are horrible. They seem to be happy with it as well since it's mainly a browsing machine.

That counts for one fairly modern intel desktop, one old amd desktop and one old amd laptop. I'd wager it's not enough of a sample, but it's also not "just one machine" either.

Honestly, I've seen many big companies adopt large budget updates instead of simple solution simply because someone in IT had pretty much your kind of attitude. "I think this may not work so we shouldn't bother trying". Early XP's hibernation was really unstable, so I can understand where such attitude would come from in IT support people.

Re:Make it Not Crash and Not Leak Memory

[mcvos]

I doubt it. I didn't have these problems with 3.6.13, as far as I'm aware. Note that I'm a bit of a power user, though. I've got two windows with dozens, possibly totaling more than a hundred, tabs open. Some of them with big articles, some of them with flash stuff of heavy javascript. I only close it during the weekends (or when it crashes, obviously). When I mentioned on facebook that 3.6.14 froze on me, coworkers from years ago immediately said I should probably close some tabs. And I'm sure that will help. My point is that I didn't have to do that on 3.6.13.

Almost 10 years ago on my 233 MHz Pentium 2, I had about 200 sites open in Opera 5. It took about 15 minutes to close (just like Firefox right now), but otherwise it worked fine.

Re:Make it Not Crash and Not Leak Memory

[hairyfeet]

Uhhhh...WHAT attitude? The "I don't want to have to throw away working machines so I better find something else" attitude? That one? Just because you haven't tripped the condition doesn't mean the condition doesn't exist you know.

Both me and the OP has hit it, and dealing with probably a dozen or more customers a week I've been getting more and more complaints of "Firefox is acting slow" My machine keeps flashing the front light (HDD) when I have FF on for any length of time" and "FF is making my machine act sluggish". Now what do you want me to tell these people? Worksforme(TM)?

All I can tell you is I just had to shut FF 3.6.whatever the latest is on my Nettop(I'd be happy to tell you the V number but since I had to shut FF down on it I went ahead and started a backup) because after 4 hours it had used up all 1.5Gb of RAM and had begun to hit swap. Now maybe it is the fact I usually have about a dozen tabs and switch between them, maybe it is as I suspect that FF doesn't give back RAM on video tabs if you switch away THEN close it, maybe Flash doesn't play nice in the new Gecko sandbox, who knows.

So if FF works great for you hey, I'm happy for you friend. But I've gotten enough complaints since FF went to the 3.6.x branch (and I've found the same behavior on FF 4 BTW) that I've been trying different browsers to find a good substitute for my customers, and the winner is Comodo Dragon.

Not only does Dragon not have the memory problem (if I close a tab in Dragon I can watch the memory fall, which doesn't seem to happen but about half the time in FF) nor the phone home "feature" of Chrome, but on my modern Windows users (which since the release of Win 7 has been growing rapidly) Dragon is much safer than Firefox since after 4, count them 4 years FF STILL doesn't support low rights mode in Vista/7, it has some extra security features like domain name validation and the option to use Comodo secure DNS which blackholes known malware sites.

So I'm glad that it WorksForYou(TM) but there are plenty of us where it don't. There is also an easy way to keep an eye on FF and see how much memory it is REALLY using if you have Chrome or Dragon or any other Chromium based, just use this trick.

Having the SAME tabs open and using the SAME extensions (ABP and ForecastFox) I have FF 4 using more than double the RAM of Dragon at 293Mb VS 132Mb, on this Win 7 X64 machine I'm typing on while I wait for the nettop to finish backup. So you can say WorksForME all day long, sitting here watching FF's memory slowly creep up on this machine I can say I've had enough, thanks anyway.

Re:Make it Not Crash and Not Leak Memory

[perryizgr8]

and if you leave ff4 open for a day or so, it will start sucking up ~20% cpu continuously. this annoys me. almost enough to push me over to ie9.

Re:Make it Not Crash and Not Leak Memory

[darrylo]

And that could still be related to the above-mentioned gmail issue -- with this, once you leave FF4 running long enough, the garbage collector should start sucking up lots of resources (e.g., 20% cpu).

Re:Make it Not Crash and Not Leak Memory

[billstewart]

Kid, I've been using web browsers since before Mosaic came out. A "Flash problem" that chokes Firefox is a Firefox problem. If Firefox can't safely send stuff to Flash without choking the whole Firefox session when Flash does something stupid, then Firefox isn't protecting itself adequately. Sure, it wouldn't surprise me if Flash or Javascript is acting stupid as well, but it's Firefox's problem to keep Firefox running.

I used to run far larger instances than you do - typically about 200-300 tabs in 8-10 windows, but I've moved a lot of my tabs over to Chrome and today my sessions's down to the size of yours, but it still hung up this morning, going from ~800MB to 1.4GB. The newer versions behave a bit better, in that they'll now often leak memory and hang but not burn the whole CPU core while they're doing so, but it's still unreliable and annoying.

And it's not like Google Chrome doesn't have trouble either - if it gets overwhelmed, typically all the tabs in a given window will turn into the "Oh, Snap!" page. A typical way to trigger that is to go to a news aggregator site like Fark.com, open all the stories in tabs, and see if it lives. Sometimes Firefox does ok, usually it burns a bunch of CPU for a while and then recovers, sometimes it tanks. Google usually tanks.

Phones? Tablets?

[ironjaw33]

Where this really matters is for mobile phone and tablet platforms, where people expect days of use without a recharge. Moreover, on mobile devices, the display and radio dominate power consumption especially when using a web browser.

Re:awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

...i'm *pretty sure* that the two members replying to the ac *shill* deserve a:

whooooosh

Grasping at straws!

[sillivalley]

I'd say this is unbelievable, but it's all too believable -- grasping at anything to show that we are better than them.

Just how is this relevant in the real world? Oh, you measured a difference -- but is this measured difference repeatable over repeated runs on the same system let alone repeated runs on a wide cohort of systems, and is this difference really significant to a user? Let's see -- a ten minute difference over a 220 minute period, that's a whopping four percent! Run these tests a few more times and tell me if that difference is statistically significant (let alone clearly outside the expected margin of error) on the same machine, let alone over different machines.

Oh, and that run time graph is right out of "How to Lie with Statistics" -- cutting off the zero to make the difference in the length of the bars look more significant than it actually is.

I've got a much better one -- this whole "green" thing only appeals to people concerned about energy conservation. There's a bigger audience out there to grab for...

Let's take the current versions of all these browsers, and count all the "1" bits and all the "0" bits in the binaries.

Wouldn't it be great, absolutely stupendous, if IE9 had the smallest difference between the numbers of "1"s and "0"s? Then we could claim, correctly, just as correctly as with this energy consumption thing, that IE9 is the LEAST DISCRIMINATORY browser out there! All those other browsers out there DISCRIMINATE against "0"s (or they discriminate against "1"s) -- just look at the numbers! Do you want to use a browser that is blatantly discriminatory?

So now you could claim that IE9 is not only greener but it's also less discriminatory!!!

Well, unless you count discriminating on the basis of intelligence...

Re:Grasping at straws!

[Prikolist]

Yeah my first thought was how anyone with slightest knowledge of statistics would laugh at this test. A blank page, a mysterious "news site" (which was probably one of MS sites tailored for IE), and something weird that's not even supported by one of the tested items. That's meaningless. You want a large range of sites, with every kind of content, say webmail, video, large image photo gallery, social networking sites, and so on and so forth. And not just loading a page but have the user move the mouse over stuff, click on pretty buttons and links and menus and so on. Oh, and include plenty of plug-in content like flash and other video/audio/animation, maybe a bit of Java to top it off. This is a hand-picked joke of a test, lamest attempt at marketing I've seen in a while.

IE uses NO power on my computer

[stumblingblock]

Very low power usage. I guess some windows updates go through IE, but nothing else.

Firefox 4 still beats them all

[Cito]

Firefox 4 is still tops in speed, power consumption, and "mod-ability". I've used chrome, opera, and others in past but since Firefox 4 every single test I've ran compared to other browsers Firefox 4 is #1 in leaps and bounds. Mozilla has really pulled ahead of the competition with this version. Can't even perceive what is coming next in firefox 5

Re:Firefox 4 still beats them all

[amliebsch]

So FF5 will be imperceptible?

Did you perhaps mean "conceive?"

Useless test

[Anonymous Coward]

The test doesn't actually measure power efficiency and when I first read the summary I instantly thought that IE would come ahead if they just plotted a time x power consumption graph. IE renders pages slower than the other browsers but that doesn't mean that it's maxing out the components during rendering. This means that another browser which actually maxes out the resources and renders pages faster would still come behind in these tests. Notice how they carefully planned the FishIE Tank so that all browsers would render at 60fps. While, maybe with a hundred fishes, Chrome would still render at 60fps while IE would struggle with low-digit fps. Battery lasts longer, but you see animation in slow motion. Nice tradeoff?

Chrome not good for laptops?

[fabregas256]

The Chrome results are most surprising. I always thought it was the most efficient, while Internet Explorer and Firefox were bloated and slow. If these results are correct, it looks like Chrome is a bad choice if battery life is important.

I still don't think I can bring myself to using Internet Explorer but Firefox's results are close enough.

arm processor

[cmdr_tofu]

Can you run IE on an ARM processor yet? I'd like to see IE9 running on Intel Atom (or whatever the lowest power x86 processor supported is), versus Firefox or Chromium running on Linux/ARM. Then we should see some significant differences.

Well....

[Anonymous Coward]

And yes, when you work for the same company that wrote the freaking operating system, one would hope that IE would use the least amount of power.

Have you actually used Windows lately?

Lynx is most power efficient

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't even load the GUI and save orders of magnitude of power hogging overhead.
More about Lynx: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)

Re:Special characters

[zippthorne]

I like the ampersand, because you're showing someone how to make one with HTML entities, you have to spell it, &amp;amp;

It is simple math

[Anonymous Coward]

The faster the browser, the less energy usage... (setting aside the CPU, Memory, GPU usage it used to make it faster), the idea is, the longer your computer is running, the longer you are using your monitor, and harddrive, and memory, and CPU, etc... the more power you use. Simple! Duh!

IETestDrive

[zish]

Of course Galactic is going to work best with IE9! It's designed by the same org!
In time, most HTML5 performance hiccups of most compatible browsers will be fixed, leaving this site pointless.
What was the "News Site"? How do we know it wasn't specifically designed with IE9 in mind, or had help from the someone close to the IE9 project? It didn't say "unaffiliated News Site", or "Independent News Site". It could just as easily be msnbc.com, which is affiliated with Microsoft, and thus will probably work best with IE9.

One more thing: Why were the browsers jumping around to different spots on each summary graph? That was really annoying to have to follow!

easy power savers...

[Anonymous Coward]

... regardless of browser choice: FlashBlock (or equivalent), maybe NoScript. Seriously.

If only!

[Anonymous Coward]

If it only required Windows, I would, well, just not give a flying rat's ass about it. Requiring Vista or 7 is an unabashed attempt at a money grab: "oh, you need to pay us the MS tax again for that." If not - well what kind of cross-platform magic is it that Opera and Chrome and FF can do, but IE can't?

Alright! Since we're on the subject of energy....

[ibsteve2u]

Warning: Following this link may result in your taking actions that benefit the human race. The range of potential negative consequences include a decline in the frequency of Middle Eastern wars due to a lack of interest, a dramatic reduction in the amount of greenhouse gas emissions, and the defunding of America's Republicans.

A shameless plug that's sorta-kinda on topic.

They forgot AdBlock

[loosescrews]

Anandtech has done this before. They found that Firefox + AdBlock Plus yielded the best browsing battery life because Flash Ads are a huge power drain. It doesn't matter how good IE or Chrome get, I am still going to use Firefox because of NoScript and AdBlock Plus. Yes, I know that Chrome has AdBlock, but it doesn't really block the ads; just hide them, which completely defeats my goal; using less bandwidth. As sad as it is, not everyone can get unlimited internet.

Source:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2834/5

Re:They forgot AdBlock

[Anonymous Coward]

From what i know Chrome does have functional plugin blocking now. and Opera has had user scripts that block plugins and ad content for years, not to mention Opera IS the fastest browser in the world, especially on low CPU speed systems like notebooks using low CPU multipliers to conserve energy would be.

The math is wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know who did the math but he (or she) should visit school again.

And what about FF4+AdBlock+Flashblock+NoScript

[xtracto]

Did they tested "power consumption" of IE9 vs FF4 with extension that remove all the crap from webpages? I can imagine that after removing all the talking and moving Flash ads, the browser would require less resources.

Re:And what about FF4+AdBlock+Flashblock+NoScript

[GooberToo]

Insightful and interesting. Wish I had mod points!

insert free advert for IE9

[doperative]

"Power consumption is an important consideration in building a modern browser and one objective of Internet Explorer 9 is to responsibly lead the industry in power requirements"

This is technological BS, power consumption is a function of the Operating System. This article is just an excuse to trash the other browsers. A better title would be, Microsoft tweaks Windows to give own browser better benchmarks ..

Power != Energy

[tonywestonuk]

If my browser consumes a kilowatt of power, but renders a page in a millisecond.... then this would use less energy than one using 2 watts, but takes a second to render. The whole test is just wrong!, they should be calculating the energy usage, not the power usage.

Re:/. "fanboy trolls" can be trusted? I KNOW not..

[Gadget_Guy]

Who on EARTH do you & others like you *THINK* they're fooling?

What on Earth are YOU talking about??? What do you think that I am fooling anyone about? I state that a blog about IE will be (by definition) a partial source. How is that trying to fool anyone? How does that make me a fanboy?

And a fanboy of what? Do you think I am for or against Microsoft? Seriously, I can't think how you could think that the line of mine that you quoted could in any way be labelled as fanboyism. Of all the things that I have posted, this must surely be the LEAST controversial statement ever to come from my keyboard!

Curiously, no mobiles?

[gig]

I guess mobiles were excluded from this study since IE9 doesn't run on them? Because anyone who cares about low-power browsing would have to swap in an ARM chip for Intel. And in practice they would be running MobileSafari on iPad which can browse the Web over Wi-Fi for 10-12 hours on a single charge with a smaller battery than any of the PC's Microsoft tested.

Basically, excluding mobiles is like doing a portability study and only including desktop PC's, not notebooks.

Even if you had to run an Intel chip and cared about low-power, obviously, you would run a Mac, which has way, way better power efficiency than Windows. The Mac manages the CPU and GPU better, uses the GPU exclusively for drawing the interface, and sleeps and wakes and idles much, much better than Windows.

So once again, we have Microsoft acting like the whole world is just Windows, and therefore not telling the whole story.

This test means precisely dick

[GameboyRMH]

Browser benchmarking tools are mostly ridiculously biased - or to be very generous, mysteriously seem to perform far, far better on the browser from the same company that created them. And not just the commercial browser vendors, the little guys are guilty too.

So it should come as a surprise to nobody that Microsoft uses their own benchmarks in this test as well as an unnamed news site (can you say CHERRY PICKING?), and in the end IE happens to come out on par with or better than all the competition, in this test performed by Microsoft, using Microsoft testing tools.

Re:Special characters

[metacell]

But how did you spell what you just wrote? ;-)

Re:Why is "being green" always bathed in sanctimon

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm with you on this, in fact, why should we even consider the wasting of human life to be sacred, we should all prescribe to your idea that to not waste anything in this world should be counteracted with willful waste, so let people die, when we have the choice and option to do sanctimonious thing and not be wasteful.

Re:IF YOU CAN'T TELL THE TRUTH (like you)

[Anonymous Coward]

APK, please die. Every time some microshit story is posted, there you are - like a fly on a piece of shit. You're an ignorant, cretinous, moronic turd who should keep out of any conversation involving grown-ups.

Re:Why is "being green" always bathed in sanctimon

[Anonymous Coward]

What's not responsible about having ones company produce products that use less energy? They have "responsibly led" their companies. Nothing sanctimonious about it.

If they didn't, people would still use the products that use more energy than necessary. If the low energy products don't meet their requirements, they still have the regular products to fall back on.

It seems you're just angry.

Re:Efficiency Features

[Anonymous Coward]

Use the HTML entity &gt; to get >, &lt; for <

Leave it to slashdot to make html markup the default. :)

If Internet Explorer takes less power to render a web page slower, I'm all over it. Next, we'll take a moped cross-country.

What am I talking about? Specifically this:

[Anonymous Coward]

#1 - YOU doubt ANYONE could consider them impartial:

"That said, this is an IE9 blog we are talking about. I doubt that anyone could consider them to be impartial." - by Gadget_Guy (627405) * on Wednesday March 30, @06:00AM (#35664464)

Have you EVER considered that MS does have serious competition from OTHER browsers now (they do in Chrome, Opera, and FireFox - they're ALL great today, & all of them bear 0 known security vulnerabilities lately)

AND

That "fudging a test" in their favor impartially, even in the SLIGHTEST, would be DUMB and they'd get snagged for it & look like shit?

Hey - With competition like the other 3, & considering MANY folks today code + know benchmarking that would be 'suicide' for them in a test?

(They cannot afford to do something that dumb... & their INTENDED design goal for Win7, one of the MAJOR ONES, was power saving!)

#2 - This was the one that REALLY seemed "partial" from you though:

"They posted this because they want to spruik their browser." - by Gadget_Guy (627405) * on Wednesday March 30, @06:00AM (#35664464)

Not sure what "spruik" is, but I wager it's similar to "pimp"!

So, sure... they want to show off that they have a power-lean browser (good for laptops, and household power bills - yes a MAJOR concern, your money & laptop battery time longevity "on the job" etc.)...

However, the way that sounded (to myself @ least, especially considering THIS is /., home of the "anti-microsoft/Pro-*NIX trolling brigadge" most especially)?

It was like it was just to "fool everyone with bullshit just so they could say 'hey look at us, we rock'", with slanting the test to THEIR favor unfairly albeit w/ somekind of "magician's 'sleight-of-hand' prestidigitation ONLY!

(Hell - they even stated WHY Opera eats more juice because of timer resolutions... basically giving Opera a way to correct IF they wish, instead of "holding back" why - yes, that's FAIR, & more than fair imo to competition... & though Opera has TREMENDOUS coders? Nobody sees every trick or possible, & they MAY have overlooked it & yet MS tells them there basically, along w/ the rest of us, how to "fix it" & rather easily (I have been a professional coder for nearly 17 yrs. now, & it's a VERY easy fix in fact)).

So, in the end/that all said & aside: Get it why I saw your post as rather "impartial" in & of itself for HOW you phrased it?

APK

P.S.=> I.E.-> That's what I meant, specifically... "capice"? apk

When running on a mac, that is

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the same computer is MUCH more power efficient running Mac OS X than running Windows, this seems to be an odd argument for Microsoft to be making.
Anandtech:

Apple claims 10 hours of battery life for the MBP13 when running OS X, and Anand hit pretty close to that mark when testing it out with his light web browsing test. Now, we’ve shown before that OS X is more optimized for mobile power consumption than all versions of Windows, so going into this test the expectations were a fair bit lower.

And for good reason; the MBP13 (running Windows 7) showed fairly similar battery life to some of the older Core 2-based systems. With it’s 63.5 Wh lithium polymer battery, the MBP hits 5.5 hours on our ideal-case battery test, and exactly 5 hours on the web browsing test. While this is decent for the average Core 2 notebook, it’s pretty woeful compared to the OS X battery life of the MBP. If you have no reason to run Windows (program compatibility, gaming, etc) you’re better off in OS X just so that you can get about double the battery life.

Apple's Windows hardware drivers (Boot Camp) have lousy support for power saving features under Windows, so battery life under Windows is much lower than under OS X, where Apple has awesome driver support for power saving.

That doesn't mean that Windows can't have good battery life. Every other PC vendor puts effort into their Windows drivers, since every other PC vendor uses Windows as a primary OS.

Re:When running on a mac, that is

[MCSEBear]

As the Anandtech article points out, despite the hardware only getting half as much battery life under Windows as it would on a Mac OS, they class this performance under Windows as "decent". As their testing shows various laptops from Asus, Toshiba, MSI, Gateway, fare WORSE running Windows than Apple's hardware.

Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

It really depends on the hardware and version of Linux.

I run Fedora on my Dell D630 laptop. In Fedora 10, it spewed useless X11 data to disk. About 1GB per day. I doubled battery life by sending those messages to /dev/null.

Fedora 14 is a tickless kernel, which should be more efficient than traditional Linux kernels - as it shouldn't need to run the CPUs as often when idle. When Firefox is running, I see about 200 more wakeups per second than when Firefox is not running. This is on my list of things to investigate. My battery life is about 3/4 what it was under Fedora 13.

Re:Says the transparent NIX fan & TRUE AC? LMA

[Anonymous Coward]

That's right - I'm a troll and you just got trolled. You wasted minutes of your life replying with that garbage post. Minutes you won't get back and I couldn't give a fuck about what you have to say, asshole.

Keep your drool to yourself (wiping spittle here)

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaha, THANKS man! Fact is, you prove my point perfectly with your profanity laden, off-topic, hiding behind AC ad hominem attack, once again:

"That's right - I'm a troll and you just got trolled." - by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30, @10:28AM (#35666470)

Thanks for the admission (though your 1st post was obvious + "transparent" (your FAV. color & the "choice of trolls" lol) also)...

Sure/yes, yes: You're "really helping /. look 'credible'" (lol, NOT!)

---

"You wasted minutes of your life replying with that garbage post." - by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30, @10:28AM (#35666470)

1st of all: They're MY "minutes to waste" & exposing a technically challenged & WEAK off topic troll like you? WELL worth it, lol!

Heck the "trollish likes of YOU"? Hehehe - you do it for me, via admission of it here now... grow up!

(Fact is, others note that trolls such as yourself MAY have "mental issues" (was a big post here this week/last week in fact) -> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Dr.+David+Burns%22+and+%22Trolls%22+and+%22slashdot%22&btnG=Search )

SO - As a troll would say (since I like to speak in language that my opposition understands, lol, & I 'do as the romans do'?):

A Dr. David Burns wrote it in fact!

SO, please - "Get help/take your meds", especially per the article's statements above since you FIT the criteria SO WELL (not me saying it though, the article did & it was good enough for this site), etc. etc. / et al, lol!

LMAO - just "disarming you gently", this time in terms YOU clearly use yourself, & understand ( + with facts from my init. reply to you, here http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2060164&cid=35666286 as well as my 1st reply which used facts... FACTS THAT SHOW LINUX IS SECURITY SWISS CHEESE in its KERNEL ALONE vs. NOT ONLY THE ENTIRETY OF WINDOWS, but ALSO ITS ATTENDANT ENTIRE BUSINESS DEV. SUITE etc./et al too! ).

Ah, man - I just GOTTA say it, as is per my "usual style":

This? This was just "too, Too, TOO EASY - just '2EZ'", lol, & you made it even easier... up to you though, it's YOUR website here, & your trollery isn't making it better for you all... you're destroying /. yourselves & others are noting it.

Too bad - this place DOES have some fairly smart well-informed folks, but the % of trolls? Unreal, & YOU?? You're a CLEAR EVIDENCE THEREOF!

---

"Minutes you won't get back and I couldn't give a fuck about what you have to say, asshole." - by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30, @10:28AM (#35666470)

Please, see subject-line & at least TRY to be considerate of others (once again here, wiping your "FoAMiNg @ tHe MoUTh" profanity-laden trolling DROOL off my face, lol!)

APK

P.S.=> Thus endeth the lesson, & before you try to "troll me"? I've been trolled by FAR better than yourself, & facts/figures, logic, & more from respected sources ALWAYS gets trolls & "pro-*NIX" fanbois in an "uproar"... lol, especially the Penguins (see this one's feathers "all ruffled" everyone? LMAO!)... too easy, & THANKS for making it that way for me! apk

Re:Why is "being green" always bathed in sanctimon

[Anonymous Coward]

http://ecoiron.blogspot.com/2007/01/black-google-would-save-3000-megawatts.html
http://ecoiron.blogspot.com

Enjoy

Re:Special characters

[SleazyRidr]

&amp;amp;amp;?

Re:Alright! Since we're on the subject of energy..

[geekoid]

the electricity, not oil, dumb ass.

It would have the benefit of replacing coal and very little impact on anything in the mid east

Re:Alright! Since we're on the subject of energy..

[ibsteve2u]

Good to know that you're willing to rule out electric/battery, hydrogen, and fuel cell-powered cars as well as electric trains, buses, and other forms of mass transportation.

Of course I should have clued in to your superior knowledge and ability to predict the future from the fact that you chose to use two words to inject your personality into your comment instead of one.

I sense a distrortion field...

[UBfusion]

For "Scenario #3: Power Consumption on News Site", try to watch your CPU usage when you go to cnn.com (or amazon.com or ebay.com). In my humble experience, I get very high CPU usage just after I visit the page and during the page rendering process, especially when it's a java-intensive news site. Looking at the Scenario #3 graphs, I expect to see a high transient power (or energy) peak in the beginning which falls gracefully when the page has finished rendering. I don't expect to see a flat line (plus-minus background task consumption noise) the whole time through. This makes me think that they actually plotted only the power consumed after the page has been fully loaded, meaning that all Scenario #3 graphs actually do not include data after the true time origin (0.0 min).

The above flatline illusion is carefully staged by Scenario #2: about:blank. It is a flat line, but that's normal - about:blank rendering uses negligible CPU or GPU. Therefore Scenario #2 is used to prime your perception with the illusion that there are no transients in such graphs. In Scenario #3, the time origins in graphs might well be the true ones.

In conclusion: scenarios #1, #2 and #3 seem to represent steady state consumption rates after the pages have finished rendering. Scenarios #4 and #5 also feature steady state graphs, but these are more meaningful because they're HTML5 animations.

In addition, when browsing news sites, you have to scroll a lot to read a long article. Scrolling seems to consume a lot of CPU if your gfx card is rather old. In addition, scrolling on GPU-accelerated browsers will reduce CPU usage, but increase GPU processing. I'd really like to see some scrolling power requirements, which IMHO represent the realistic use of a browser (rather than that of men staring goats.)

Finally: What's the use of making graphs of 7 minutes of staring at a blank page, or the same news page in scenario 3? Are browsers expected to suddenly change behavior and begin consuming power after say 5 minutes of staring at a blank page?

If they opted to measure energy and not power consumption (like member tonywestonuk insightfully remarked a few comments above), they'd have to produce cumulative energy charts starting at true zero origins and my bet is that the final picture would be much different...

Re:IF YOU CAN'T TELL THE TRUTH (like you)

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah.. hes posting facts with sources, and you.. .all you have is some childish insults. Your brain is moderately defective. Please try and get it fixed.

Re:Special characters

[socialleech]

Just say no to w3schools... http://w3fools.com/

Re:Why is "being green" always bathed in sanctimon

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, being "Green" would inherently mean using more fossil energy, and adding more CO2 for the plants to breathe.
Don't tell the zealots, but plants convert more air and grow faster if there is a higher concentration in the air.

Re:Keep your drool to yourself (wiping spittle her

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realise that by replying again, you've only made the troll more successful? I also love the recommendation that I get medical help from YOU! Brilliant!

Industry Leading?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Pehaps I am stating the obvious here but even with the tests which that have posted on that site Chrome & FF4 still beat IE9 (all-be-it not by much) but they still beat IE9....so how is it industry leading?

You're an off-topic troll w/ mental issues

[Anonymous Coward]

"You do realise that by replying again, you've only made the troll more successful? " - by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31, @02:50AM (#35675306)

To that? See subject-line above...

---

"I also love the recommendation that I get medical help from YOU! Brilliant!" - by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31, @02:50AM (#35675306)

Man - not only are you a TROLL, but an ILLITERATE TROLL as well!

Don't give ME the credit here either - I only base it upon it's the recommendations of an actual Doctor, & his name is Dr. David Burns... he wrote up an article called "disarming trolls gently" & it was featured on /. here within the past couple weeks in fact! What do shrinks do? They can proscribe meds. I cannot. So... there you are.

---

Above all else though - you're an off-topic troll. Trolls like yourself are KNOWN to have mental issues, per Dr. David Burns... so, that's YOUR problem, not mine. You're just fucked up!

APK

P.S.=> That was just "too, Too, TOO EASY - just '2EZ'"... apk

LAUGH @ HAIRYFEET people (see inside, hilarious)

[Anonymous Coward]

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061048&cid=35681060

(Hairyfeet's SUCH a dumbass, he doesn't know the diff. between STATICALLY ADDRESS IP BASED banners & DYNAMICALLY ADDRESSED ONES using host/domain names!)

LOL, I mean, ok - listen to his b.s. ALL YOU WANT, but only AFTER you read the URL from this website above, lol!

(He sure is a "big talker" though, isn't he? Ripping others' work but he can't show he's done better... & he CERTAINLY SHOWED he is a fuckup in his "tech know-how" above!)

Another instance of his "big talking b.s." is here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2029850&cid=35450222

He says "automating McDonalds would be 'easy'" but he's NEVER DONE THAT... I have (one of the programmers for them, Boston Market, & Burger King's "bump bar" system).

Oh, incidentally, on FF "leaking memory"? It used to have a problem with MEMORY FRAGMENTATION:

http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/

(NOW - THAT? That should be fixed now, but it's still a possible... only speculation here though (& I am one of the folks that have helped FF's teams FIX BUGS before in the past, @ NTCompatible.com)).

I am the guy that designed the VERY first FIRST GUI Windows Memory Defragmenting program ( that many others copied after)...

Microsoft designed the FIRST though, in clearmem.exe (albeit console mode app only, & NOT schedulable - block freeing RAM defragments it by forcing to pagefile.sys, & page coloring does the rest on re-access).

Fact is - My program, and yes, MS' are good enough to stop Exchange Servers halting in fact, worldwide, until it went 64-bit, & my program's commercial ware.

APK

P.S.=> Just "too, Too, TOO EASY - just '2EZ'", but then again? "Pwuffesuh HaiwyPheet" is only an "ITT Tech Boy" techie... lol! apk

Hairyfeet's STUPIDITY, quoted... LMAO! apk

[Anonymous Coward]

http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061048&cid=35681060

(Hairyfeet's SUCH a dumbass, he doesn't know the diff. between STATICALLY ADDRESS IP BASED banners & DYNAMICALLY ADDRESSED ONES using host/domain names!)

LOL, I mean, ok - listen to his b.s. ALL YOU WANT, but only AFTER you read the URL from this website above, lol!

(He sure is a "big talker" though, isn't he? Ripping others' work but he can't show he's done better... & he CERTAINLY SHOWED he is a fuckup in his "tech know-how" above!)

Another instance of his "big talking b.s." is here:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2029850&cid=35450222

He says "automating McDonalds would be 'easy'" but he's NEVER DONE THAT... I have (one of the programmers for them, Boston Market, & Burger King's "bump bar" system).

Hairyfeet - any dumb ass can use tools others make in software, or build systems based on PROVEN technology... the answers ALREADY THERE, for you, simply to adapt.

It's QUITE another thing, to build it yourself, from scratch... & I have, to pretty great acclaim over time in the software world in technical contests like MS Tech Ed, Respected publications in the IT/IS/MIS/CIS/CSC world, & FAR more... have you? Nope.

You're a TRAINED CHIMP that uses work others build for them, & then? Then, you try to "pass yourself off as 'smart'"?? Please... the above shows CLEARLY, otherwise.

APK

P.S.=> Just "too, Too, TOO EASY - just '2EZ'", but then again? "Pwuffesuh HaiwyPheet" is only an "ITT Tech Boy" techie... lol! apk

Thanks 4 the support fellow AC!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yeah.. hes posting facts with sources, and you.. .all you have is some childish insults. Your brain is moderately defective. Please try and get it fixed." - by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30, @04:25PM (#35670744)

See subject-line, it's sincere (as I get trolled a lot, & by idiots like TomHudson & his pals here, posting as AC to do so -> http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2059420&cid=35659556 no less - that's ok: I've already driven 1 of them COMPLETELY from this forums (clone), who used MULTIPLE registered accounts & tried the AC posting trick but was caught in it... he left /. (slashdot) months ago & hasn't come back!)

APK

P.S.=> Unfortunately though, the "trolls" here are going to say YOU are ME, because we use AC posting, but... that's ok - you & others have noted the "real deal" on the parent poster being modded up to +5 for COMPLETE HORSESHIT vs. my post here you replied to -> http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2060164&cid=35661244 ) ... apk

Definitely not a gmail bug

[billstewart]

I've moved more than half of my standard browser windows over to Chrome (mostly stuff I don't care if Google snoops on, but not reading news online because Chrome still chokes on that.) Gmail is one of the things I run on Chrome.

Ms = 2/5 unpatched sec. vulns (vs. Linux 19)

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's DOWN TO 5 UNPATCHED SEC. VULNS IN THE ENTIRE MS PRODUCT LINE YOU USE TO DO BUSINESS ONLINE: (& 4x less unpatched security vulnerabilities than Linux has, no less, in its "latest/greatest", albeit KERNEL ONLY (makes a difference, read on)):

---

Vulnerability Report: Microsoft Office 2010: (04/12/2011)

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/30529/?task=advisories

Unpatched 0% (0 of 4 Secunia advisories)

---

Vulnerability Report: Microsoft SQL Server 2008: (04/12/2011)

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/21744/

Unpatched 0% (0 of 4 Secunia advisories)

---

Vulnerability Report: Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.x: (04/12/2011)

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/17543/

Unpatched 0% (0 of 6 Secunia advisories)

---

Vulnerability Report: Microsoft Visual Studio 2010: (04/12/2011)

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/30853/?task=advisories

Unpatched 17% (0 of 6 Secunia advisories)

---

Vulnerability Report: Microsoft Internet Explorer 9.x: (04/12/2011)

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/34591/

Unpatched 0% (0 of 0 Secunia advisories)

---

Vulnerability Report: Microsoft Windows 7: (04/12/2011)

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/27467/?task=advisories

Unpatched 8% (5 of 59 Secunia advisories)

AND, of those 5 vulnerabilities, yes... 2 are still "remote". HOWEVER, they have EASY work-arounds, OR, are caused/utilized by faulty 3rd party apps you can just avoid, as there's usually an alternate app for most anything!

(E.G.., & of ALL things? Apple stuff triggers one, ITunes another, iirc, etc. but no other apps are KNOWN to - go figure, eh?).

The remaining can be avoided by not just downloading & running "anything" etc. (being utterly stupid in other words, or just ignorant (which in the case of a child, I could excuse (not an adult)).

I.E.-> "NO PROBLEMO!"

&

ALMOST 4x LESS THAN IS PRESENT ON THE LINUX 2.6x KERNEL ALONE (toss on the rest of what goes into a Linux distro? That # goes "up, Up, UP & AWAY...", bigime, "increasing that lead, that Linux has", lol, in more unpatched known security bugs present that is (a dubious honor/win, lol, to say the least!)

---

So, that "all said & aside"?

Microsoft's doing a HELL OF A GOOD JOB on the security front!

NOW: Compare a "*NIX/Open SORES" OS in Linux's "latest/greatest"?:

---

Vulnerability Report: Linux Kernel 2.6.x (04/12/2011)

http://secunia.com/advisories/product/2719/?task=advisories

Unpatched 7% (19 of 259 Secunia advisories)

---

THAT? That's more than 4x as many as Windows 7 has that are unpatched, & has a REMOTE BUG UNPATCHED in the "ROSE" subsystem... PLUS, I'd wager there aren't EASY workarounds for them (or as many as MS has shown above)...

AGAIN - THAT'S ONLY THE LINUX KERNEL MIND YOU, not the entire 'gamut/array' of what actually comes in a Linux distro (such as the attendant GUI, Windows managers, browsers, etc. that ship in distros too that have bugs, and yes, THEY DO), THAT ADDS EVEN MORE BUGS that COMPOUNDS THAT # EVEN MORE!

So, so much for "Windows is less secure than Linux" stuff you see around here on /., eh?

(It gets even WORSE for 'Linuxdom' when you toss on ANDROID (yes, it's a LINUX variant too), be