Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Which would piss me off if they sold it as a general purpose computer instead of a "Chromebook" that runs... Chrome.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
firefox runs just great on my chromebook, just install chrubuntu and it's just another linux box.
tell us about the os choices on your surface hardware
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.
Google doesn't have a monopoly on the desktop... hasn't been convicted of illegally using that monopoly to give a market advantage vs competitors including their browser. That would be apples to apples if Microsoft were advertising Edge on bing.
Yet again, Microsoft is up to their old tricks. Sleezily shoving windows 10 down the throats of users and now slimy tricks to get people to install their new browser.
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.
Ironically Chrome runs just fine for me on Windows 10, however Edge does not. It regularly 'comes up' and then doesn't load correctly. This gives me a useless window that won't connect to sites on the internet. Ever. I open and close it enough it it may eventually open correctly. Chrome? Chrome always opens. Firefox did as well when I had it installed. Opera works fine and all the time as well. No idea why Edge can't work right, but it's the one I won't be using.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
It's about holding a dominant position in the computer OS markets and utilizing that to further entrench your dominance. The same applies for example to Google using their dominant position on the search engine markets to promote their own products at the expense of competitors' visibility in search results.
-SR
See how much battery power it saves!
Hey, nice battery you've got there, end user, it would be a shame if something.. HAPPENED to it.. Maybe you'd better use our Edge browser, you know, for your own protection
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
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.
So what's the news? Google pushes you to download Chrome every time you visit their site.
I don't have to use Google. In fact, I use DuckDuckGo instead. I pretty much have to use Windows for business reasons. You see the difference?
Then there is simply the old school belief that a computer OS should be a neutral platform, enabling the user to make the computer do its bidding, not serving up ads that you can't turn off on a device that you actually need to use.
Except Edge sucks so incredibly bad that even if it made my battery last three times as long I wouldn't use it. With great effort we've finally rolled out our default apps XML file through GPO settings to all but make Edge disappear, because that astonishingly terrible hunk of shit even wants to open PDF files by default.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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