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Microsoft Says Edge is Still More Power Efficient than Chrome and Firefox (neowin.net)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the browser-battles dept.

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."

17 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. If only... by bblb · · Score: 4, Funny

    If only it worked as well in the real world as it apparently does in tests.

    1. Re:If only... by jwhyche · · Score: 2

      Wouldn't this be the truth. I like the concept of Edge. A small little browser with out all the crud. Unfortunately, there are still to many little annoying bugs.

      --
      I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
    2. Re:If only... by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      A small little browser with out all the crud.

      Yeah, I don't like CSS, either. Oh, wait!

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    3. Re:If only... by Leslie43 · · Score: 3, Funny

      Unfortunately, there are still to many little annoying bugs.

      Windows 10 is not a bug, it's a feature!

    4. Re:If only... by Z00L00K · · Score: 2

      It makes it even more power efficient since you don't use it.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    5. Re:If only... by KiloByte · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah. They bash Firefox as "slow" while it's the only browser among these three that can discard a meaningful part of ads and tracking. _All_ people I care about see no ads (either by being tech-minded on their own, or by having someone set it up for them), so a realistic test should have no ads and trackers included.

      And those cause more than 90% of slowness.

      Right now (family home), I'm sitting on a 32-bit Pentium4 with an ancient monitor, while the good monitor and 4294967296 SoCs sit unused (long story...), and Firefox works pretty adequately. Also got a super-restricted new laptop (Thinkpad T480) with me -- Chrome on it is _slower_ than Firefox on the P4.

      --
      The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
    6. Re:If only... by Deathlizard · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
    7. Re:If only... by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      So add an extension. Problem solved. Not everything needs to be (or should be) in the core.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. Who Cares? by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A browser that is so dysfunctional that no one uses it, who cares how efficient or fast it is?

    --
    Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    1. Re:Who Cares? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      One interesting thing to note from the testing methodology though:

      Windows Update was temporarily disabled

      Okay Microsoft, I need to verify your results. How do I disable Windows Update completely?

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  3. Re:Strange... by ArhcAngel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You're looking at the war from the wrong direction. History showed us what happens when a strong player in the market decides to implement special features without a standards bodies blessing. Web sites start using the feature making all other browsers behave badly on their site. Which drives users to the browser that works on the site. There are companies literally still using IE 6 because their mission critical intranet application will not work on any other browser. Fast forward to today. Google is the dominant player and Chrome is full of new features that have not been submitted to a W3C or any other standards group. Google is hoping to further edge out (pun intended) the competition. The war is for market share and there are real dollars on the line.

    --
    "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
  4. Is it really more power efficient? by Solandri · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Most of the time I run CCleaner on my laptop, I get a message saying it needs to close Edge to clean its cache files. I don't use Edge. So apparently Microsoft has gamed it so Edge runs in the backround even if you don't use it.

    That makes me wonder about the tests where Edge "beats" other browsers in power consumption. Maybe they were actually measuring the power consumption of Chrome + Edge, vs only Edge.

    1. Re:Is it really more power efficient? by Gruff+2005 · · Score: 2

      You're right about Edge running in the background, after the last update and going through settings I was surprised to see Edge turned on. I know I had it off plus I never use it, why does it need to be running?

    2. Re:Is it really more power efficient? by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  5. It all comes down to... by h33t+l4x0r · · Score: 2

    shared library shenanigans that boost Edge performance.
    They will switch to Chromium, remove the shenanigans and we're back to zero.

  6. Re:Strange... by StormReaver · · Score: 2

    Browser development is way out of the realm of open source hackers.

    That is very amusing, considering that Blink, the rendering engine in Chromium, is descended from Webkit, which is descended from KHTML, which is the rendering engine created by Open Source hackers for KDE's Konqueror Web browser.

    Blink is Open Source, so a skilled Open Source hacker could have a working Web browser running in a weekend if he really wanted to. Its rendering accuracy would rival Chrome and Firefox right out of the gate, so said hacker's job would be the usability of the Web browser rather than the nuts and bolts of getting pages to render right.

    One common renderer usable by anyone for anything is what we Web developers have been clamoring for in the last twenty five years.

  7. Microsoft tweaks Windows to make Chrome look bad? by najajomo · · Score: 2

    “Edge lasts 24% longer than Chrome and a massive 94% longer than Firefox on average”

    Assuming this to be true, that would mean that Edge renders pages more efficiently that the others. If so, the most plausible reason for this would be that Edge is using different API calls than the rest. If so that would mean Microsoft is cheating on this test. It wouldn't be the first time softwares premier software innovator has done so. There even was a name for this back in the day, Microsoft Undocumentation.