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Windows 10 Warns Chrome and Firefox Users About Battery Drain, Recommends Switching To Edge (venturebeat.com)
A month after Microsoft claimed that its Edge web browser is more power efficient than Google Chrome and Firefox, the company is now warning Windows 10 users about the same. VentureBeat reports: Microsoft has turned on a new set of Windows Tips that warn Windows 10 users that Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox is draining their laptop's battery. The solution, according to the notification, is to use Microsoft Edge.In a statement to the publication, the company said: "These Windows Tips notifications were created to provide people with quick, easy information that can help them enhance their Windows 10 experience, including information that can help users extend battery life. That said, with Windows 10 you can easily choose the default browser and search engine of your choice."
You know what would enhance my windows 10 experience? Allow me to disable driver-breaking updates.
And when you run Edge or Firefox on a Chromebook, Chrome OS warns.... Oh wait. You can't run 3rd party browsers at all under Google's Chrome OS.
Better known as 318230.
Chrome, Firefox, or for that matter anything not out of Microsoft won't run.
So what's the news? Google pushes you to download Chrome every time you visit their site.
I've found Edge to be unstable on many sites. It's also slower than Chrome, Firefox, or Opera. The biggest issue I have with Edge is that I cannot add uBlock Origin as an extension, which reduces data usage and speeds up browsing. Edge is a real POS that should never have been released when it was. Edge being the default browser on Windows 10 is what helped Chrome become the most widely used desktop browser. Microsoft will do and say whatever they can to try to win people back to the MS browser camp. No thanks.
Edge saves power on a few benchmarks but not across the board. Throwing out an arbitrary number of "x" percent could be saved by switching will confuse all the family members that call, asking if they should switch. On the other end, Windows 10 is their own product. They can kind of do whatever they want, and we can decide if we use them or not.
It's laughable that they claim to care about the battery now. If they really cared, they'd let me shut down my fucking laptop without installing updates.
Hey Microsoft! I don't always have time or battery power to sit around waiting for updates to install!
I expect most of it is because Edge is already running in the background (Integrated web browser). So When running Chrome of Firefox it is using more power because you are running Edge and the other browser. If you could fully deIntegrate the web browser from Windows You may see Windows running with less power requirement. And when you kick off a third party browser you may not see such a drane.
Also I expect your other browsers are using the extra processing power to do things like properly rendering the page. And not the cheapo decade behind the times compatibility that Edge has to offer.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Yup, but not on my desktop itself.
I only see those notifications when I visit google's webpage as part of (or in place of) other ads.
As opposed to a 'notification area' being used as an advertising area. It'd be nice though if they made a button called 'yeah I acutally know what i'm doing, leave me alone' ... I mean besides installing linux of course.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
an ad blocker for edge. last time I tried it they didn't have any ad blocker (please no host file APK spam) I refuse to run a browser without ad blocking because of malware.
Oh, on the contrary. It is very *well* concieved and implemented.
It was conceived to be privacy destroying nightmare, and they did a fantastic job building it.
Will Microsoft pitch a warning that LibreOffice is stressing your hard drive more than a fresh copy of Office would? (click here to buy)
Howabout you plug in your smart phone to charge, and Windows replies with a message that Android nerds are sad losers with tight pants and bad hair, quick use this coupon and receive a lovely Lumia and join the Windows Winner's Revolution.
You heard it here first. Marketers gotta monetize.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Well ... seriously, on my Asus Zenbook running Linux Mint 17.2, I get 10 hours of battery life if I'm not running Chrome but that goes down to 4 hours if I leave Chrome up in the background.
I have to agree that Chrome is a battery eater; Firefox is a lot easier on my battery, but not running processes I don't need is even better.
I don't have Windows installed so I can't compare with Edge.
Whoah, wait, Edge is integrated into Windows? Didn't we already go down this path with IE way back when? ugh :(
Chrome will automatically unload the contents of tabs you can't see in low memory conditions.
Which makes it harder to open things in tabs to read later while offline, as it'll often try to reload them from the Internet instead of cache.
In the late 1990s Microsoft was found guilty of violations of the anti-trust laws for using their monopoly in one market (operating systems) to leverage market share in another market (browsers). Through a number a dirty tactics, Microsoft stole the browser market from Netscape and avoided the creation of an independent, OS-neutral, platform for running applications.
Now, twenty years later, Microsoft up to its old tricks. Using the Windows 10 market share to leverage its browser. I'm thinking the Department of Justice might want to take a look at the Microsoft consent decree from their last conviction.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Backwards compatibility is not a valued feature in MS Office and various measures to "clean out cruft" have meant that all Open/libreoffice had to do to have better compatibility is not throw things away.
I still stand by the very old lesson from the days before MS Word was integrated with Excel etc - if multiple people are working on stuff with the same non-standard file format and appearance matters then they had all better be using the same software and the same version of that software. Not long ago there were a ridiculous number of fuckups in my workplace due to MS Office 2010/2013 incompatibility.
Depending on the situation they often do - graphing in MS Excel sucks in a technical environment and the current UI for MS Office adds a lot of time consuming busywork that did not previously exist in menu driven UIs.