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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.
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.
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.
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.
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..."
Is battery life the most important thing especially when the difference is not dramatic and it severely lacks many basic features?
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
Android is a Linux system.
Technically correct (the best kind of correct).
Then let me narrow it: I don't want Edge on my X11/Linux programming laptop.
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.
A company that has been found guilty in a court of law of criminal behavior. What credibility do they have?
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.
That's easy enough to set as your homepage, yet hard to explain to a significant other...
Android is only a Linux kernel. The entire run-time environment is Google's own. And since it spends most of its time providing an architecture-independent interface to processors that don't need it, because they are mostly 32 or 64 bit versions of ARM, I feel doubly disinclined to claim responsibility for it.
Bruce Perens.
Does Edge for Android use their own browser engine yet or is it still just a shim around the system webview like on iOS?
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.
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.
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.
They use the Blink engine from Chromium on Android and WKWebView on iOS. This is so that their web browser provides 100% compatibility to the native platform.
Edge still misrenders are more pages than Chrome. It's also sometimes not all the way compatible with HTML5 pages because of it's different JavaScript core. (Safari and Firefox both suffer from the same issues.)
What is this mysterious Edge you speak of?
When you write out the Greek letters Chi-Rho, you get something that looks much like "XP".