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Microsoft Says Edge is Still More Power Efficient than Chrome and Firefox (neowin.net)
An anonymous reader quotes Neowin:
Every time Microsoft releases a Windows 10 feature update, it runs some efficiency tests to prove that its Edge browser is significantly faster than the competition, which includes Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Then the company posts the detailed results on its Windows blog and YouTube channel, boasting about the power efficiency of its browser. Even though the company still has run battery tests, it has remained strangely silent about them, posting about it on GitHub only. While many thought that Microsoft's silence on the matter was due to Edge finally losing to the competition, it appears that this is not the case.
As spotted by Paul Thurrott, Microsoft has indeed run efficiency tests for Edge in Windows 10 version 1809, pitting it against the likes of Firefox and Chrome. Through these tests, the company has concluded that Edge lasts 24% longer than Chrome and a massive 94% longer than Firefox on average.
"While Edge appears to have won these efficiency tests easily as well, it is likely that the company did not decide to promote this achievement -- as it has always done previously -- because of the planned abandonment of EdgeHTML in favor of Chromium," the article concludes.
"It will be very interesting to see if Microsoft Edge is able to maintain its battery advantage once the switch to Chromium is complete."
As spotted by Paul Thurrott, Microsoft has indeed run efficiency tests for Edge in Windows 10 version 1809, pitting it against the likes of Firefox and Chrome. Through these tests, the company has concluded that Edge lasts 24% longer than Chrome and a massive 94% longer than Firefox on average.
"While Edge appears to have won these efficiency tests easily as well, it is likely that the company did not decide to promote this achievement -- as it has always done previously -- because of the planned abandonment of EdgeHTML in favor of Chromium," the article concludes.
"It will be very interesting to see if Microsoft Edge is able to maintain its battery advantage once the switch to Chromium is complete."
You're reading too much into it. On Windows 10 UWPs like Edge, the store, Pictures etc don't ever get closed but rather they get suspended. They sit in RAM but are otherwise blocked from executing any task until some external event (e.g. user running the executable) rewakes the process. If the system runs low on memory the suspended processes get dumped.
This has the effect of only helping initial startup times. These suspended apps don't consume any CPU or power. They only reason they exist at all is because part of superfetch is that it pre-executes these apps so they are ready to go when you need them. Though I wish it wouldn't do it for those apps which are unused.
>"After all these years I have a hard time understanding why "browser wars" are still a thing. We've got plenty of options and more perhaps coming."
No we don't. We had four major browsers: IE, Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, and Safari. Everything else is now barely noise on a graph. Of those 4, only TWO are multiplatform (Firefox, Chrome) and open source (Firefox, Chromium). And only one (Firefox) is open development, browser-only company, open-source, and multiplatform.
Google's hard-core Chrome marketing efforts (and Mozillia necessary overhaul of Firefox) have decimated Firefox (despite its now fantastic performance and modern abilities). And now Microsoft is almost handing their browser to Google.
Make no mistake thinking you really have choice- I actually came across more than one site now that is NOT programmed to open/neutral standards and have become, essentially, "Chrome only" sites. Yes, flashback time. What is that site? Cox Communications. Now you can't even RESET YOUR ACCOUNT PASSWORD IN FIREFOX OR SAFARI. YOU MUST USE CHROME (and hours on the phone with tech support verified this insanity). And this is my ISP! So if you thought this kind of stuff was in the past (like I did), wake up and smell the new IE6.
So, no, depending on your needs and platform, your *effective* "choice" is rapidly disappearing.
To be fair I haven't run into game ending flaws in rendering using Edge recently, but that not the reason I don't use it. The main reason why I use Firefox (and Chrome) over Edge is it's user interface. Edge's interface is broken, idiot designed and needs to die in a fire.
For example. I use a lot of bookmarks. The way I use them is I add the bookmarks toolbar, create a folder (IE: news, weather, games, etc) and then bookmark each site in the respected folder and sort them top to bottom from most to least used. Chrome, Firefox, even IE does this correctly while Edge still struggles to do this right. At first you couldn't even put a folder in the bar, then you could but couldn't sort them. Then you could sort then but the sync would sort them backwards, or worse duplicate them. Then sync stopped working altogether. then it would cut off long names, ETC
On top of all that, they even got clicking on the folders wrong. In Chrome and Firefox, you click on a folder, the folder opens, and then you can just highlight other folders to see their contents. in Edge (and IE) you click on a folder and then have to double click the next folder (one click to close the one you were in. Another click to open the one you're currently on) to open it, which slows you down and is infuriating. This simple UI adjustment would make Edge almost on par with it's peers in usability and ease of use.
This is just one of many stupid decisions they made to the user interface. I haven't even started on History management, extension issues and other UI things. To be fair some of them have been fixed over time (like importing and exporting bookmarks from other browsers since you'll be doing that a lot because sync is broken and using extensions with inprivate browsing) but there's still a lot to be desired.
Simply put, If they would fix the interface issues instead of focusing on idiotic useless features like "I CAN DRAW ON THE SCREEN!!" they might have been a little more competitive.
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