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Google Chrome Bests Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Opera In Independent Battery Life Tests (betanews.com)

Posted by msmash on from the getting-to-the-bottom-of-things dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: YouTuber Linus Tech Tips has pitted Microsoft Edge against Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera and discovered that it does not deliver as strong a performance as Microsoft claims. Linus Tech Tips took four Dell Inspiron laptops, with the same specs, and found that Microsoft Edge trails Chrome and Opera in battery life tests. It would seem that it still beats Firefox, after all. However, the results are much, much closer than what Microsoft's own tests indicate. On average, the difference between Chrome, which offers the best battery life, and Microsoft Edge is under 40 minutes. Opera comes closer to Microsoft Edge than Chrome in this test. Even Creators Update, which based on Microsoft's test should help Microsoft Edge obliterate the competition, didn't help make it faster than Chrome. Linus says he used the same methodology that Microsoft used in its set of battery tests earlier this year, in which it declared Edge as the winner.

2 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Testing methodology by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Maybe, but Linus did everything that GP asked for.

    Meanwhile, Microsoft didn't in their own tests, and in fact used just a sample size of one. If anything, I wouldn't take Microsoft's numbers seriously.

  2. Configuration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    A family member's machine was "running slow" so I setup Firefox and configured it not to use disk cache at all.
    She has broadband internet and does not go near her monthly limit and frankly I think the network request can serve the content up faster than the laptop hard drive.
    Google Chrome and other browsers lack the feature to really minimize disk writes by eliminating disk cache.
    RAM is cheap and she generally just puts the thing in standby, meaning sites are still cached in RAM if their cache metadata hasn't expired them.

    I'll bet it would beat all of the tested configurations hands down for battery life (energy efficiency and battery lifetime) as well as storage device (HDD, etc.) lifetime.

    Disk cache doesn't make sense, so if Firefox is the only browser that TRULY does not write to disk, then reward them for their forward thinking if their browser has configuration settings that can tilt the axis of the test.