Microsoft Boasts of Tiny Energy Saving With IE

judgecorp writes "Microsoft has sponsored research that indicates that its Internet Explorer browser uses less power than the competition, Firefox and Google (there's no explanation of what causes the difference). However, the difference in power use is not really significant — it's about one Watt when browsing. Browsing for 20 hours at this rate, the IE user would save enough power to make a cup of tea, compared with Firefox and Chrome users. That Microsoft commissioned and published the report seems to indicate a certain desperation to Microsoft's IE marketing efforts."

Comments

It adds up

[Joce640k]

...a certain desperation to Microsoft's IE marketing efforts

Not at all. If you run a company with 10,000 PCs then it's a significant saving.

Re:It adds up

[crutchy]

What company is stupid enough to pay for 10,000 Windows licences?

Re:It adds up

[aglider]

Yes, only if all of them are just browsing the internet all the time.
But if they are making real work, maybe the results would not be that good.

Re:It adds up

[Joce640k]

Well..certainly not one that would allow their employees to have two extra cups of tea per week.

Re:It adds up

[ameen.ross]

I fail to see how using IE over the other major browsers yields a net saving. Power usage is only one factor. And it still remains to be seen how objective this sponsored study really is, as MS doesn't have the best track record in that regard.

Re:It adds up

[wvmarle]

The difference is about 5% in power use of the computers only. Which may translate to 1% or less overall savings.

However IE is also slower in rendering pages, causing productivity loss (a few seconds a page of employee time eaten up) which easily costs more than the energy cost saved.

Re:It adds up

[jimshatt]

And besides that, you'd really need to calculate energy cost per rendered page. I might be able to make a browser that uses half the energy competing browsers use, but renders 2.5 times slower. But yeah, productivity loss is probably even more significant.

Re:It adds up

[LordThyGod]

Yes, only if all of them are just browsing the internet all the time. But if they are making real work, maybe the results would not be that good.

You have to consider the source here too ... its Microsoft. It was "sponsored" research, which translates to "rigged" test with rigged results. So it is indeed done for marketing purposes, or why else do it. Probably a simple web page with little css or js. You can't take anything they say at face value.

Re:It adds up

[tripleevenfall]

I fail to see how using IE over the other major browsers yields a net saving. Power usage is only one factor.

That is the biggest factor that makes this dumb.

So you save a little electricity - how much are you losing elsewhere in lost productivity, insecurity, virus infestations, etc, because you are using IE?

Re:It adds up

[Anonymous Coward]

And no mention of test conditions... with the actual report containing niceties like this:

In addition, at the request of Microsoft we set the JavaScript timer frequency to “conserve power” in
the Windows power options. We found, however, that the default Javascript time frequency for all
computers tested was set to “maximum performance.” We did not investigate the impact of this setting
upon browser power draw.

Re:It adds up

[DeathToBill]

No it's bloody not. Honestly people have some weird ideas about arithmetic. If your average PC uses 100W then the difference in browser power usage, 1W, is 1% of that usage. It doesn't somehow magically become 50% if you're running 10,000 PCs - it's still 1%.

But, for the same of argument, let's do the math. A company with 10,000 PCs each consuming 100W during work hours is using 1,950 MWhr (100W * 37.5 hours per week * 52 weeks per year * 10000 PCs / 1000000 W per MW = 1950) per year to power those PCs. Retail electricity is around 12.86 p/kWhr, so they're spending £250k (1950 kWhr * 12.86 p/kWhr * 1000 kW per MW / 100 p per £) on electricity to power their PCs.

A company with 10,000 PCs presumably has 10,000 employees to use those PCs. Suppose they all earn the minimum wage full time, costing £12,000 each (£6.19 per hour x 37.5 hours per week * 52 weeks = £12,070.50 per year - call it £12k). Those 10,000 employees cost the company £120 million per year.

So our company with 10,000 PCs is spending £250k on electricity and £120m on wages. But wait! All those savings will add up! Suppose those users spend every working hour browsing the web. That means they would each save 1950 Whr per year (37.5 hours per week * 52 weeks per year * 1W). Retail electricity is 12.86 p/kWhr, so each employee saves a whacking great... um... 25p per year (1950 Whr * 12.86 p/kWhr / 1000 W per kW). Yes, all those savings add up to £2,500 across the whole company. That's 0.0021% of your combined staff and electricity costs.

Now suppose you live in the real world and not all your employees work in front of a PC all the time and they only spend about 75% of their time browsing the web when they do and some of them, God forbid, take a holiday every now and then. How much do those savings add up to? Sweet. Bugger. All.

Re:It adds up

[1s44c]

You have to consider the source here too ... its Microsoft. It was "sponsored" research, which translates to "rigged" test with rigged results. So it is indeed done for marketing purposes, or why else do it. Probably a simple web page with little css or js. You can't take anything they say at face value.

I don't think they go as far as rigging the research. What I think they do is pay for thousands of very specific research topics and publish the ones that show them favorably and bury all the others.

If this is the best they could come up with they really are losing the browser war.

Re:It adds up

[Mitchell314]

Apple?

Re:It adds up

[Anonymous Coward]

Or an executive a £250,000 bonus for saving power!

Re:It adds up

[aglider]

How much ActiveX can you see out there? I see much more Javascript and HTML5 ...

Browser energy?

[aglider]

I'd like to know how can they tell whether the energy has been ate by the browser, the scheduler, the idle process or whatever else is in a Windows OS!!!
And I bet that IE v1 (not v10) would eat much less power as it supports a tiny slice of HTML and other web related technologies.

Re:Browser energy?

[aglider]

In a real world system, nothing stands still and everything is in flux.
Unless you can finely account for every single CPU instruction and hardware activity to the browsing, then it's unlikely your "test with and without" will yield anything relevant.
Even if you reboot the system after every single test you won't be able to get the very same "execution environment".
And this is why I am asking: there seems to be not enough information on how the test has been conducted and measured.
To me it smells like crap. I could be wrong, but the smell is awful.

Re:Browser energy?

[Wonko the Sane]

I normally don't care about browser power usage, until I'm trying to maximise the time left on my laptop battery, and then I play close attention to CPU usage and power consumption.

On my laptop Konqueror wins by a very wide margin when it comes to being able to browse the Internet for as long as possible on a single charge. Firefox and Chrome are absolute pigs by comparison.

Re:Browser energy?

[agm]

A better comparison would be IE running on the OS that is required to run it compared to Chrome running on a different OS. keep in mind that to run the IE OS you also need a vurs checker running. I'm sure the IE/Windows/Virus checker combination would gobble more power than, say, a Linux compiled from source targetted to the hardware and running Chrome.

Megawatts worldwide

[Camembert]

It is a small saving on one computer, but take all the computers with IE in the world and it becomes a lot of megawatts. It wouldn't be a bad idea from an ecological viewpoint if this kind of efficiency became more important.

Re:Megawatts worldwide

[gbjbaanb]

amen to that. Its not just ecological issues that benefit from efficiency - there's a reason why modern applications run about the same perceived speed as their ancient counterparts did on ancient hardware - generally its because the programming involved is now built on layers of layers of abstracted frameworks.

For example, I run a few graphics-intensive games and they work fine, then I run a couple of not-so graphically intensive games that were written using XNA and the cooling fans come on full blast. I don't think its a coincidence that the 'easy to use' abstraction of XNA leads to overall inefficient use of my gfx card (and the power required to run it) where the better libraries that require better developer skills don't.

If MS is targeting efficiency, then we should see an improvement in speed as well as saving the planet from all those millions of PCs running these things.

Disable Flash

[ninjanissan]

Now what would really save some energy on many computers would be to disable Flash. Flash commercials on some sites really waste many CPU cycles (energy). On my poor old computer it is clearly visible on the CPU load :) If you are using a laptop it will also make your battery last longer as a bonus!

Theehee thats a bad comparison

[Barryke]

No matter how silly the original article is, this /. article is even lamer.

Browsing for 20 hours at this rate, the IE user would save enough power to make a cup of tea,

Heating thee? Thats a really bad comparison!

Or .. a good one if you realize how inefficient heating with electricity is, especially relatively to other useful household things such as anything with batteries, your DVR, the lighting, a tablet, or even a laptop.
On my 35W laptop this means 3% power savings.

(my dupe comment on a dupe submission: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3846941&cid=43962015 )

This article seems to wind down on the marketing effort. Whats news in that? I rather like this fact exposing instead of the shockshell courtroom cases.

On the other hand...

[gishzida]

Microsoft failed to mention the amount of power wasted cleaning up malware infections brought about because IE is not able to block malware 'mouse over' attacks. "Ad Block Plus" and "No Script" kill crapware attacks before they happen... unfortunately IE is part of the problem rather than the solution.

Re:On the other hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried IE 10? Seriously, actually given it a go? Or are you just speaking out of zealotry rather than experience? FF has made some anti-customisation (and thus anti-user) changes lately that are really pissing me off. I think they've gotten a bit big-headed, or they're terrified of Chrome, either way, MS has been working really hard improving their browser and perhaps they do feel justified in feeling unfairly judged and perhaps they can feel desperate - they've put in a tonne of work and everybody keeps dumping on them - without actually giving them a fair go.

Re:On the other hand...

[Nutria]

FF has made some anti-customisation (and thus anti-user) changes lately that are really pissing me off.

I haven't noticed any. What kind of changes?

OS comparison

[TheP4st]

I wonder if initially it were meant to be a OS comparison but the outcome were not the one wished for so they had to settle for a browser comparison.

1 Watt is HUGE on mobile!

[bemymonkey]

As I type this in Firefox, Lenovo's Power Manager is showing power usage of about 6W. 1W less would be a 17% decrease! With the 9-cell battery currently attached, that's a 2h20m jump in battery life.

Of course, I've already dropped FIrefox's power consumption significantly using Adblock, Noscript and so on, so it's unlikely I'll see a full Watt of improvement by switching to IE, but for others, this could be huge.

Hard to believe

[countach]

I would have thought the fastest browser was the most efficient, thereby making the fastest browser also the most efficient in power. That makes this study very hard to believe.

Re:Hard to believe

[thegarbz]

I believe it. Firefox, Chrome, etc are all independent programs. IE however is part of the OS. Microsoft has been telling us that for years. :-)

Test procedures

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's look at the test procedure in the actual report...

Measure the true root-mean squared (rms) current, power, and voltage for each UUT over a six (6)-
minute period at 1Hz (averaging over 1s period) for the following test conditions:
a) Baseline: No browsers or other windows open
i) First perform a preliminary measurement of power draw in this mode for the UUT, to
ensure that the lowest suitable current range has been selected on the power meter to
maximize measurement accuracy
(1) Record the current range selected for testing the UUT
(2) Record at least 6 minutes of ‘Baseline’ UUT operation with no browsers.
(3) Move the mouse/trackpad once a minute to prevent the unit from going idle
b) Static Website Test: Three different browsers (Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Mozilla
Firefox) will be used. Each browser will be tested for the Top 10 U.S. websites as of March 25,
2013 (listed below, from Alexa 2013). The UUT will then be rebooted after all ten websites have
been tested. In all cases, the browser will have two ‘background tabs’ open to
cse.fraunhofer.org and cfvsolar.com, both static landing pages.
i) Each browser will be directed to the following websites, with all cookies accepted. Data
logging will begin immediately when changing the target website to capture transitional
power draw.
(1) Google.com
(2) Yahoo.com
(3) Live.com
(4) Youtube.com
(5) Facebook.com
(6) Wikipedia.org
(7) Ebay.com
(8) Amazon.com
(9) Craigslist.org
(10)Bing.com
ii) Record all power, current, and voltage measurements in a database. Each test will take
place for at least 6 minutes.
iii) Move the mouse/trackpad once a minute to prevent the unit from going idle

Notice the "at least 6 minutes" part...
So if we change sites every 6 minutes with one browser and every 30 minutes with another, that's still perfectly valid.

And then this gem:

In addition, at the request of Microsoft we set the JavaScript timer frequency to “conserve power” in
the Windows power options. We found, however, that the default Javascript time frequency for all
computers tested was set to “maximum performance.” We did not investigate the impact of this setting
upon browser power draw.

Study conducted using Windows 8

[Bearhouse]

But you have to check the PDF to find that...
http://preview.tinyurl.com/kyp6ypz

Selected quote: "The variation between websites and the technology they use seems to be far more significant, with YouTube clearly burning up to 3W more power than other popular sites such as Google. And more complex media experiences, delivered by sites using Flash or HTML5, appear to burn even more energy, with heavy HTML5 and Flash sites causing an increase in power draw of up to 8W or 9W (effectively adding 50 percent to the machine’s power draw)"

So maybe IE can make more power-efficient use of Win8 when playing YouTube videos? Not really a surprise...
Put noscript, adblock etc. into Ffox and save! (Also on bandwidth..)

Would have been nice to have seen Fraunhofer (who conducted the survey) try and retain some shred of dignity by comparing performance on other platforms.
How about Safari on PC & MAC? Chrome & F'fox on Linux also?
Maybe because IE only runs natively on Windows?

I run browser on other operating system

[stasike]

OK. I could save one watt by running IE instead of [insert your favorite browser here]. But then I would have to run it on Windows, and install anti-mallware, anti-virus and other anti-CPU measures.
I think I am much better off running a less efficient browser on Linux, even with a memory hog called KDE 4 running the whole show.

Re:No method?

[wonkey_monkey]

As with many Slashdot stories linking to news reports of scientific experiments, you may need to travel a whole two clicks away:

we installed three popular browsers, Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox, on six new notebook and four desktop computers running Windows 8. We then measured the average power draw over one-second intervals for a six-minute period with each of the individual browsers open, for each of the ten most-visited websites in the U.S. In addition, we also measured power draw for both the Flash® and HTML5 versions of an online video, as well as the Fishbowl HTML5 benchmark.

Battery power

[jibjibjib]

On a laptop or tablet, one watt is a lot of power to waste. But of course it looks small when you compare it to an irrelevant but very energy-intensive task and add some anti-Microsoft flamebait.

Re:No method?

[realityimpaired]

Windows 8... That answers everything. Remember a year ago, when the browser creators were complaining, because Windows 8 wouldn't let them run their renderer natively, so they had to either take a CPU hit to run interpreted code, or use the Trident rendering engine?

I'd like to see the same test done on Windows 7...