Opera Denies Microsoft Edge Battery-Saving Claims (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: According to the makers of the Opera browser, Microsoft's recent claim that its Windows 10 Edge browser is more power-efficient than Chrome are erroneous. Running its own tests with Opera, Edge and Chrome, the company finds that Opera runs 22% faster (with a battery life of 3hr 55m) than Edge (3hrs 12m). In Microsoft's own tests, Google's Chrome browser was the first to completely exhaust the battery, closely followed by Firefox and Opera. In May, Opera added a power-saving mode, but any advantage it can be verified to have in the energy-efficiency stakes may be more due to the native adblocking feature it introduced this year.

Comments

That's assuming your no1 metric is battery life

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Me, I'd rather sacrifice some runtime so long as I don't use a Microsoft or a Google product.

Re:That's assuming your no1 metric is battery life

[tripleevenfall]

Don't worry, you'll be automatically upgraded from Opera to EDGE for your convenience.

Ad blocking FTW

[AmiMoJo]

Any test needs to include uBlock Origin or the equivalent. Even Edge supports it now, I read. Otherwise any test data will be corrupted by random advertising altering the content and wasting as much battery power as it can.

Also, it's not clear that they even tried to match the laptop batteries. Maybe some where lower capacity than others, due to manufacturing variations and lifetime degradation.

Re:Ad blocking FTW

[s_p_oneil]

I feel about 100% certain that Microsoft did in fact choose target sites that favored Edge. Opera was probably a little less "professional" in that way.

Although to be honest, I don't think any ad blocker could be as inefficient as the ads themselves. Every site I manage to visit with my cell phone that has a bunch of ads brings the browser to its knees, which drains the battery faster. Even on my desktop, I find that Chrome performs fine until I hit a site with ads that seem designed to go out of their way to be as annoying as possible (which usually means plenty of poorly-written JavaScript, often combined with audio/video).

Re:Ad blocking FTW

[Grishnakh]

There's two sides to this: any competent user these days will not browse without an ad-blocker, but you're right, adding that in muddles the waters because the ad-blocker is a significant piece of software by itself and has a huge effect.

I think the solution is that we need a better test: the browsers should all be run in standard, default configuration ("out of the box"), and then in one or maybe two more configurations with an ad-blocker (two for trying two competing ad-blockers). The obvious test here is to add uBlock Origin to each browser (if available), and also ABP, since those are easily the two most-popular blockers.

Showing the results of all 4 browsers, in 3 different configurations (or less, some browsers may not have certain blockers available), would be a much more comprehensive test showing its strengths and weaknesses.

Re:Ad blocking FTW

[thegarbz]

One of the tests involved playing 4 videos at the same time. Any ad you think would be affecting the outcome would not significantly sway that result.

Re:Ad blocking FTW

[thegarbz]

I feel about 100% certain that Microsoft did in fact choose target sites that favored Edge.

Yeah. Facebook, Amazon, Youtube, Google and Wikipedia. A completely unlikely set of websites for the average user to visit.

The first time someone picks a browser based on...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

The first time someone picks a browser based on power usage...lemme know.

Re:False argument, an intentional diversion

[QuietLagoon]

typo - I meant to say "sucks", not "sicks".

Re:Forget about Edge. It's Firefox that's interest

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Did you read what I wrote? I care about not running a program made by an evil company first, and about efficiency a distant second.

How many runs?

[kenji.toyama]

How do they run these experiments? I don't see any deviation in the measurements. It'd be nearly impossible for the thing to run exactly for 3h55m every time. It should probably be given as 3h55m +/- X minutes. Also, do they swap laptops to eliminate innate differences in batteries between the machines? Say laptop A running Chrome dies after 3h00m and laptop B running Edge dies after 3h10m. Do they run the test again with laptop A running Edge and laptop B running Chrome and get the same results? Do they repeat the runs on different laptop models?

Re:Forget about Edge. It's Firefox that's interest

[BronsCon]

The interesting part is actually how Firefox is the worst performing browser in the test.

Did you not even read TFS? Because:

Google's Chrome browser was the first to completely exhaust the battery

Which leads to:

We often hear from Firefox supporters that Firefox is more efficient than Chrome and other browsers.

It's clearly more efficient than Chrome, as per the results of this test.

I can't afford to be ideology-driven, as I'm a web developer and must test my work in all browsers. I'm comparing them side-by-side, day in and day out; yes, if you manage to wrangle all of Chrome's little sub-processes and add up their memory usage, Chrome is using more memory about half the time. Sometimes it swings in the other direction, and by about the same amount, so I'd say, honestly, on average they use about the same amount of RAM.

Re:The first time someone picks a browser based on

[Ayanami_R]

I'm letting you know. Battery life doubled over Chrome.

Bury it quick!

[GeekWithAKnife]

AdBlocking does not only load pages faster, helps block tracking and other semi-malicious activities but it also saves battery time!

Ads are big revenue streams, someone has to bury this before the word spreads to the uninformed masses.

Re:Opera is still a thing?

[CrashNBrn]

Considering it has more users than Firefox, when you include Opera Mini - I would say a fair number of people "knew".

Re:Forget about Edge. It's Firefox that's interest

[Lab Rat Jason]

The test they performed is pretty much invalid because it's such a narrow case... they played a movie until the battery died. I'd really prefer to see a test where they script browsing or something... so that there are a range of behaviors tested, rather than just a movie.

this site is optimized for PseudonymOS

[Pseudonymous Powers]

According to the makers of the Opera browser, Microsoft's recent claim that its Windows 10 Edge browser is more power-efficient than Chrome are erroneous. Running its own tests with Opera, Edge and Chrome, the company finds that Opera runs 22% faster (with a battery life of 3hr 55m) than Edge (3hrs 12m).

What a surprising result. It's strange, when I tested the browser I wrote myself, "Pseudonymium", using my own hand-picked test criteria, which I call the "Pseudonymo" benchmark, the results said that my browser was, and I quote "one point nine and one-third percent times more betterer" than all of its competitors.

It's almost like comparison tests administered by the producers of a product versus competing products in the same market segment are inherently untrustworthy.

Re:Forget about Edge. It's Firefox that's interest

[thegarbz]

I found in my experience Firefox uses far less memory than Chrome for displaying content, however Firefox has this tendency to not free up memory sometimes. I find after having both Firefox and Chrome open the entire day without closing doing various opening and closing of tabs alone, by the end of the day when you open the same content side by side in Firefox and Chrome, the former would use far more RAM.

But really none of that concerns me. RAM is cheap. Now Firefox seems to take longer to open tabs, grinds to a halt far more easily, and overall feels sluggish. Whether it is or not is not really relevant since I am not a benchmark.

At least it was about 5 versions back. I finally had Firefox crap itself during an update and the solution was to nuke my profile. So I did by switching to Pale Moon.

Re:False argument, an intentional diversion

[bondsbw]

I've heard this a lot on Slashdot. I haven't used Edge very much. So, please tell me what makes you think it is so bad at web browsing.

(I'm not asking about OS compatibility, your UI design preferences, or other things that aren't related primarily to the browsing experience.)

Re:False argument, an intentional diversion

[cjjjer]

He probably has not even tried it because, you know Microsoft and all...

Re:Forget about Edge. It's Firefox that's interest

[BronsCon]

Firefox does definitely have a memory leak; for me it takes a couple weeks, maybe a month, to become an issue. In that same timeframe, I often catch Chrome using the same amount of RAM, or more, with the same tabs open (testing the same work on the same sites); eventually, Firefox does crap itself and nearly double its RAM usage, though I'm not sure if that's Firefox or one of my add-ons. I could disable add-ons to find out, but I don't want to be without them for a month or longer; it happens so rarely that it's not an issue worth my time to track down. I just kill it, reopen it, restore the session, and carry on.

For me, it only seems to get sluggish when I have a broken or poorly-coded add-on, or when it craps itself after a few weeks. I've also gone into about:config and turned off all the superfluous crap; and I'm running the developer builds, so that might have something to do with it, as well.

Re:The first time someone picks a browser based on

[oakgrove]

Has this been independently verified by an impartial group or are you just going off of what MS says?

Re:Forget about Edge. It's Firefox that's interest

[higuita]

first, from your text looks like it is a huge difference, but it is inline with the other ones
second, edge is preloaded, chrome tries to have multiple process and be modular, so for this test might not need to load everything... but firefox is monolitic (mostly), so the at startup will load everything. If there is any flash loaded, even worst, as the flash in firefox is still a separate process and will always eat more cpu. Yes, all this are firefox problems, but... read below

finally, mozilla knows that for several years. they already have some code blocks in multi-process (but it was hard, as the base code was build as monolitic since day one) to sustain firefox until the new firefox (called servo) with rust is ready. That one will be more secure, modular since day one and be faster than any current browser. So yes, know problem, already being fixed

Servo should have the first public alpha (beta?) release in the next few months

Re:Forget about Edge. It's Firefox that's interest

[higuita]

most "memory leaks" today are add-ons related... add-ons had too much access to the firefox internals and simple errors could cause problems.
mozilla tried to limit what add-ons can access and is trying to push then to external process, so it is easier to see where the leaks are coming.

Try to disable add-ons and restart firefox to check where the leak is coming

Re: That's assuming your no1 metric is battery li

[ArmoredDragon]

Only if you like giving all of your search queries and links clicked to Microsoft, in addition to having a crap selection of addons and a fugly UI.

And while chrome has the same spying capabilities of edge, chromium does not.

Re:Forget about Edge. It's Firefox that's interest

[BronsCon]

I think I sufficiently explained why I did not, and will not, perform that bit of troubleshooting.

Re:Look at the graph and the data, shitmonger.

[Coren22]

Streaming and playing JPEGs? You do realize that JPEG is a static image format, not a video format don't you?

Re:Look at the graph and the data, shitmonger.

[BronsCon]

No, I looked at the data and confirmed that the summary is correct. You, on the other hand... well, other responses already said what I was about to type, no need to repeat it.

Re:The first time someone picks a browser based on

[Ayanami_R]

I'm going off my battery lasting 8 hours instead of 4.5 since uninstalling chrome. It's been verified by my own experience.