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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.'"
It is on msdn.com. Can we consider this a partial and fair article? I'm asking, not accusing.
Since they're not the fastest, they're claiming their the most power-friendly.
"We did it on purpose.. see?"
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.
Use the HTML entity > to get >, < for <, and so on. Slashdot accepts most common HTML entities, but alas—not unicode.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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.
Since when could slashdot not show a greater than symbol?
Um... when did Slashdot support greater-than characters in comments? Try the HTML entity, > (>). You may also be interested in less-than (<) and ampersand (&). Others can be found here.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
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.
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.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Anandtech:
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.
Possting anonymously not to whore karma.
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.
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.
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.
time to trade in your HBGary Astroturf license. this one's failed.
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).
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.
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.