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Edge Beats Chrome in Battery Test, Says Microsoft (zdnet.com)
The latest installment of Microsoft's browser battery challenge shows once again that Edge consumes less energy than Chrome and Firefox. From a report: With the Windows 10 April 2018 Update rolling out across the globe, Microsoft thinks it's once again time to square Edge up against Chrome and Firefox in a new battery-life test. Microsoft's browser experiment shows a time-lapse of "three identical devices, three different browsers, streaming one video." Firefox, Edge, and Chrome play what appears to be a Netflix video on three Surface Books. As usual, the Edge device lasts the longest, depleting the battery after 14 hours and 20 minutes. The Chrome device lasted 12 hours and 32 minutes, while the Firefox laptop ran out of steam after just seven hours and 15 minutes.
I'll start using Edge as soon as it knows what website I want to go to without me typing it in. Automated browsing.
Says Phillip Morris and Altria Group
I wouldn't use Edge even if it recharged my batteries! It's a shitty browser, on top of an awful OS.
If it takes you 14 hours, 20 minutes to download Chrome or Firefox, you've got bigger problems. Microsoft really needs to work harder on its browser downloader.
"Best browser ever, believe me! So fast it's a blur, like my wonderful hair! All A-plus; the Yuuuge crowd just loves Edge...and my hair. Chrome is for fake losers. #MEGA!"
Table-ized A.I.
considering I'm never using Edge, whereas Chrome does use quite a bit of my battery due to constant usage.
Nobody cares!
Wherein browsers are actually simply video players.
Has anyone checked how long those batteries last with a less bloated OS?
It's somewhat unlikely that the browser is what's going to determine how long your battery lasts. How often do you really ONLY use the browser, with no power hungry plugins, of course, e.g. to render videos.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I mean so what??? The UX design of Edge is atrocious. Like maybe they didn't even use a UX team bad. I'd much rather use a great browser than a shitty fast one!
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
IE6 demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that if Microsoft manages to get even the slightest lead over everyone else, their innovation will grind to a screeching halt and anything they do do will be exclusively for their own benefit.
I mean, we knew this already thanks to countless other examples of their behaviour, but IE6 is probably one of those visible and glaring, directly impacting the entire computer industry and internet.
What's with the ridiculous articles lately, and especially the ridiculous titles? Seriously. SERIOUSLY, what is UP with that?
Who wins the Assault test?
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Let me guess. You run nothing but systemd as your OS and you like it that way. Who needs an interface when you can stare in rapt joy at the blank screen, after all.
What's the point of Edge if it doesn't run on any good, professional operating system?
Bruce Perens.
Probably only edge was using GPU decoding of the video.
That wouldn't show rendering or scripting efficiency as normal actual browsing entails, just a specific media codecs efficiency
Microsoft is a very different company today than it was 15 years ago...
How the fuck is this insightful? When IE6 first came out, it actually was the best browser available. You're just a fucking moron who never moved on from 15+ years ago.
Read it again. That was exactly his point. When IE6 first came out, it actually was the best browser available.
Uh, so instead we let Google pull that.
Table-ized A.I.
When IE6 came out, I seem to recall MS publicly stating they were ceasing development of IE. Unsurprisingly, once Firefox came out and started decimating their market share, they started up again.
Yeah... :\
I believe my first words after I originally saw that article were, "Oh FFS, not again..."
Chrome has nothing over Edge or Firefox these days. I use Chrome, yet it's only out of habit, switching to Edge every so often - it's a good solid browser that is getting better and better.
I'm going to give Edge another go as my primary browser for personal/home. On Windows, Chrome has nothing these days and it's just a platform to help Google monetize my personal data for their own benefit.
Apple Safari on the other hand... just to throw it out there is not good. I'll keep using Chrome and Firefox on macOS and Linux disiti.
Android is a Linux system.
So, how do they think to execute Edge in Android?
It's nearly impossible.
Edge is unresponsive, it doesn't work in every devices as the tablets, the smart phones, etc.
Is battery life the most important thing especially when the difference is not dramatic and it severely lacks many basic features?
One issue with the last few versions of Chrome, and I am using the latest version is that if you have several tabs open then it becomes nearly impossible to type anything in the address bar. Certain characters such as space are delayed so that your address bar becomes garbled. Until they get around to fixing this issue Edge is much more useful to me.
1) 90% of the time when browsing I'm plugged into the local nuclear power plant.
2) Last time I tried Edge the only site that worked well was microsoft.com
This test was run on windows. So while edge ran alone others ran with edge preloaded. Not really a level playing field there.
1a) Your local nuclear power plant still meters the energy that it sells to your local power distributor, which in turn probably passes the metering on to you.
1b) During that other 10 percent, it still has to last between when you're on mains at one end of the bus trip and when you're on mains at the other.
The total amount of power used by the Edge browser is less overall than Chrome and Firefox combined, because no one uses Edge worldwide, no it uses no power, except when Windows tricks people into using it.
Android uses less power than Windows, so if you care more about power saving than anything else, turn off your computer and go outside for a bike ride.
It's got to be good.
A company that has been found guilty in a court of law of criminal behavior. What credibility do they have?
Nothing really wrong with Edge or Firefox Quantum but stats pretty give Chrome the dominating trophy a while ago and I don't see Chrome users jumping ship to Edge or Firefox in big numbers. Chrome is the new Internet Explorer which is pretty disturbing in itself. But even though there are great alternatives to Chrome. Users are not ready to switch, not because Firefox is faster, or Edge has a benefit in some battery tests.
Something seems out of sorts and it's not just the Donald Trump lives in the White House. Microsoft has been known for decades as the king of bloatware with it's Windows operating systems and various other applications. But now they want to start talking about one application's battery usage?
I get a chuckle thinking about how many decades it was required to reboot Microsoft Windows computers weekly so they wouldn't crash so often. And the nightly auto reboots people implemented when trying to use Windows as a web server. Fun times.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Does Edge hog RAM like Chrome does?
I swear Chrome could store each page as a big ol' bitmap and still use less RAM than it does.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
Yea, even more shadier than before.
Do you remember "Windows Cairo"? It was due out in 1993,4,5,6,7,8,9,... until it just stopped getting talked about. But it did it's primary job of stopping enough people looking at NeXTStep.
IE6 demonstrated beyond a shadow
Okay hold up for a second. You're talking about something that happened to an ~40 year old company some 15 years ago. Very little of what happened in a company that long ago applies in the modern world. Your assessment is way off base. Microsoft innovation on anything desktop related HAS ground to a halt, well and truly, even in products they are behind in such as Edge.
They have demonstrated beyond a doubt that their only core competency remaining is cloud services.
If someone has to eventually break the web, it's much better if at least you can surf the "broken web" with a cross-platform, open-source browser, instead of that closed pile of c... that only runs on their frankenstein windows OS. Don't you agree?
Microsoft's file-scanning spyware is built into the OS, Google's is built into Chrome. This is a comparison between running spyware + a browser vs spyware + a browser + another spyware. Of course double the spyware is twice the slowdown.
1. They choose a test which doesn't actually use the browser do do any processing - all it does it sit there while a video codec does all the hard, power-draining work.
2. They measured... runtime on batteries? That's ridiculous. Batteries have awful repeatability. Their performance depends on age, temperature, level of last charge cycle, recent depletion, pressure upon the cells, and sheer randomness. If you want to know how much power a program uses, just hook an ammeter up to the power cable and take the battery out. Worse, they did a time lapse of three identical devices - which means three different batteries, with doubtless some manufacturing variation. They could easily have just determined beforehand which had the best battery and made sure Edge ended up on that.
3. Publication bias? Even assuming this wasn't outright rigged (which it probably was), do you think MS would publish this if it didn't make them look good? No, they'd just bury it... and then re-run the test, or make up a new test, until they get a result that makes their product look good.
4. Firefox apparently doubles power consumption. It may not be the sleekest of browsers any more, but that seems a bit hard to believe. For one, I don't hear fans spinning quickly right now. Unless perhaps they had firefox using a different video decoder, maybe all software while the other two used hardware acceleration, in which case the problem isn't firefox - it's Netflix not handling it properly.
That's the only time the browser has better battery performance, and playing video drains the battery a lot either way, so who cares...
The browsers, and the companies that make them, all suck.
Google has become just as evil as Microsoft. Both company's want to make their browser the standard, and as soon as that happens - embrace, extend, extinguish.
Apple would do the same, if they could.
I just wish firefox worked better.
What is this mysterious Edge you speak of?
The title says it all. I would not buy batteries from Microsoft if they made them, let alone use their software products any more.
When you write out the Greek letters Chi-Rho, you get something that looks much like "XP".