IE8 Beats Other Browsers In Laptop Battery Life 263
WARM3CH writes "AnandTech tested a laptop with an AMD CPU, a laptop with an Intel CPU, and a netbook to compare battery life while running Internet Explorer 8, Opera 10, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome. They tested on simple web pages and flash-infested ones. IE8 had the best battery life on both laptops (followed by FF + AdBlock), and Safari had the worst battery life. On the netbook, Chrome was slightly ahead of IE8. The report concludes: 'Overall, Internet Explorer and Firefox + AdBlock consistently place near the top, with Chrome following closely behind. Opera 10 Beta 3 didn't do as well as Opera 9.6.4, and in a couple quick tests, it doesn't appear that the final release of Opera 10 changes the situation at all. Opera in general — version 9 or 10 — looks like it doesn't do as well as the other major browsers. Safari is at the back, by a large margin, on all three test notebooks. We suspect that Safari 4 does better under OS X, however, so the poor Windows result probably won't matter to most Safari users.'"
So in theory (Score:5, Insightful)
IE8 + adblock would give even better results!
Seriously though, how can you browse the web *without* adblock? I've shoulder surfed people doing it, and I'd rather eat my own hand.
Re:So in theory (Score:4, Insightful)
You can't have a problem when you don't know any better.
Re:So in theory (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't have a problem when you don't know any better.
It's also not a problem if you simply don't browse anywhere there's too many ads. See ads you don't like? Just close the fucking website, it's a worthless piece of shit anyway if it puts ads first and content later.
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I would have worded it a little bit differently, but this is my attitude as well.
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Re:So in theory (Score:5, Insightful)
deviantART once had a Flash add which utilised 100% of my CPU, and since it was at the time a single-core CPU, I was barely able to bring up the Task Manager to kill it. Interestingly enough, it was that experience which pushed me to using Adblock Plus.
Point is, deviantART is hardly a worthless piece of shit. Sometimes they just made bad choices about what ads to use. Generalizations are bad, m'kay?
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While the work of the artists who post on DeviantArt may or might not be worthless pieces of shit, a web page that sucks 100% of your CPU making it difficult to even close the page, never mind view it, most definitely is.
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You don't have a problem when you have powers of focus greater than a mental midget and an easy going attitude. Sure, its harsh, but its really not that hard to tune out the ads. The only ones that bug me are the pop-overs with floating boxes that you generally can't do anything about. They displease me, so I don't go to those sites. Amusingly, the only times I ever see ads such as those are when following links from slashdot.
It isn't so much a matter of not being able to concentrate on the subject of the site, as not wishing to make such a concession if we don't have to. It's possible to do a lot of things in decidedly sub optimal conditions. But if you choose the hard way freely, then you become the one with a problem.
For me, surfing without adblock is not an option. I said goodbye to annoying flash ads years ago, and have never looked back. I do enable ads on some sites, where I know they are not going to be obtrusive. Slashd
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For me, surfing without adblock is not an option. I said goodbye to annoying flash ads years ago, and have never looked back.
Aren't you looking back right now?
Re:So in theory (Score:4, Funny)
Aren't you looking back right now?
No.. If I was, I wouldn't be able to see the monitor.
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I really wouldn't switch to IE 8 for this, or many other reasons that it might supposedly be better. It's 7 minutes longer than FF with adblock, or 4% longer. Not nearly enough difference to justify using a program that doesn't work the way that I like, not to mention one that presents such a major target for malware.
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Re:So in theory (Score:4, Interesting)
I have to agree. I'm on a Macbook Pro now and using Snow Leopard with it's 64-bit Safari. Everyone is saying how fast and quick Safari is...along with Chrome, but the simple fact is both of these browsers don't have Adblock so they're actually SLOWER than Firefox with Adblock because they all have to load in those ads.
Maybe Safari and Chrome are fast on a test....but in real world situations without adblock, they're slow.
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Really? Loading less content is faster than loading more content???
Tell me, how did you figure that out???
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Re:So in theory (Score:5, Informative)
If your Safari doesn't have AdBlock, install it: http://burgersoftware.com/en/safariadblock [burgersoftware.com]
(32-bit for now...source available)
I also recommend ClickToFlash: http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/ [github.com]
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Privoxy [privoxy.org]: works with any browser that support proxy servers. It is great if you have a server machine to install it, then you can set all your home computers to use that centralized proxy.
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GlimmerBlocker [glimmerblocker.org] is similar and somewhat easier to configure, but less mature and runs on OSX only.
Works great with Safari, though, with not having to worry about things like SafariAdblock causing stability problems.
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Last time I checked, Safari Adblock doesn't work with Windows. It's a Mac-only plugin. Privoxy, as the elder sibling mentioned, is what I use for adblocking in all the browsers except Firefox.
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I always assumed that Safari was pretty well ignored even on the Mac. I mean, Firefox [i]is[/i] available on just about any platform that you'd want.
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Firefox is ridiculously slow on the Mac compared to Safari or even the open source Chromium.
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noscript/flashblock to prevent flash ads, and i don't really care about image/text ads as ill just ignore them.
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Seriously though, how can you browse the web *without* adblock?
Well.... I know you had IE in mind, but I browse the web quite happily with Firefox running Flashblock and image.animation_mode set to once (via about:config).
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I have this fascinating ability that adblock users apparently lack: it's called "Ignore Irrelevance". You see, while those ads may be there ... I don't really see them. They are there if I concentrate hard enough to notice them ... but otherwise, they're not really there.
Probably explains how I can surf without adblock.
And, oh yeah, I occasionally like to support the site I'm visiting when I notice something actually interesting.
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I also have the ability to ignore irrelevant bullshit. Despite that ability, I use AdBlock Plus. It makes a tremendous difference in the SPEED that a page loads at.
Even with my lame DSL, it can take several seconds for a page to load without ADP. Several l - o - o - o - n - n -n - g seconds. Turning on ADP means the very same page reloads about as fast as I can hit ctrl-F5. Needless to say, I install ADP on everything I own, and so do the kids. I didn't have to TEACH them - they saw the results for th
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Spoiled by speed. That is really funny.
When dial up internet finally became available in my area, pages loaded fairly quickly. Sometimes, I had to wait for a page, but overall, pages loaded fairly quickly. As time went on, and Flash and Java became more and more embedded in pages, my browser slowed more and more. Javascript slowed it even more. The browser itself became ever larger, both in code size and memory requirements. Near the end of my dial up experience, browsing was definitely painful. Even
Re:So in theory (Score:5, Insightful)
Every single one of these articles instantly devolves into a thread about AdBlock. Yes, we get it. A lot of people here like AdBlock. Can we stop fucking posting the same fucking thread in every fucking single fucking article? Christ.
It's like Ron Paul in the politics tab during the election.
Re:So in theory (Score:5, Funny)
It's like Ron Paul in the politics tab during the election.
Yeah, well, if you were using Firefox, you could get the RonPaulBlock plugin... ~
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I for one... (Score:4, Funny)
I for one welcome our new battery life saving overl-... wait... what?
The real conclusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Flash is a pig, no matter what browser you use.
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Not to mention that Flash under anything else than IE + Windows runs like a slug.
Re:The real conclusion (Score:5, Interesting)
And that is why IE8 has the best battery life - the IE version of the Flash player is hardware accelerated.
Re:Wait a second... (Score:4, Interesting)
Very simple experiment - obtain a temperature monitor that can show you CPU and GPU temperatures. (This usually needs discrete graphics, although some integrated graphics systems hide the northbridge temperature as the "PCI" temperature.) Monitor CPU load, as well.
Start a flash video in IE. Note what happens to all temperatures - CPU load will be low, CPU temps won't change much, GPU temps will rise.
Now, start a flash video in any other browser (that isn't IE-based.) CPU load will be (comparatively) high, and CPU temps will rise. GPU temps will stay steady, or at most climb a couple degrees just because of being heated by the CPU.
Re:The real conclusion (Score:5, Insightful)
But the thing is, IE processing pages with ads and flash was *more* efficient and less demanding on the CPU than Firefox processing pages with no ads at all.
That comes to me as quite a shock, given that Flash is, in fact, a pig.
Re:The real conclusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Kindof. It may just mean that the flash plugin for IE is less battery intensive than the flash plugin for FF.
We'd have to no-flash, flash-only, and a mix to figure it out. The tests here didn't.
This can't turn into a comparison of Microsoft vs Mozilla... it's probably more like a comparison of Adobe programmers on different teams.
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it's probably more like a comparison of Adobe programmers on different teams
The PPC team sure didn't used to work for Be Inc, I'll tell you that much.
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Right. It's plain and obvious to the casual observer that there's absolutely nothing Firefox can do about this problem -- after all, a third party is involved.
It's only logical.
(Except, for the sarcasm-impaired: It's not logical at all.)
Yeah right (Score:5, Funny)
It's all about wget on single user mode.
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RMS, is that you?
Bad Headline (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing beats Links or Lynx when it comes it this.
Did they have total control? (Score:2, Insightful)
2% difference... big deal. (Score:5, Informative)
The difference is within background noise - as are all these stupid tests.
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I skimmed the article and couldn't find anything on their method. There is a lot of relevent data that i simply couldn't see
1) Which has the lowest wakeups/bat usage once the page is rendered (some of us still read content instead of loading pages all day)?
2) Which has the lowest wakeups/bat usage on an active page, facebook,gmail,etc?
3) Which uses the least CPU/bat to render pages?
4) is there any difference in CPU/bat usage of flash?
Then there is so much to be asked about the method:
a)Was the environment c
Re:2% difference... big deal. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, really. It's a meaningless number.
There's no control in this experiment (and, no, I don't mean "control group.") The fact that they were flogging away at public, and probably dynamic (read: inconsistent) websites totally invalidates the entire comparison.
If Anand wanted to take it seriously, they should have eliminated more variables. If they'd set up a dedicated, light-weight web server running in a controlled minimalist environment (bare Slackware+Apache, perhaps?) somewhere on a dedicated LAN, that would have been be a good start. They might even have used a RAM disk to ensure consistent access times to the data being served.
Hell: They should have even measured the battery voltage both before and after the tests, to eliminate (or at least quantify) any incongruity in the charging circuit's behavior. And they should've made sure to rotate their testing, so as to average it out as the battery ages (which it quite measurably will in these relatively-abusive full-charge - full-discharge tests).
But they didn't do these things. And it might seem like I'm splitting hairs here, but the results are close enough that hairs must be split.
Meanwhile, I think battery life while browsing is an interesting and very practical metric which is often overlooked these days. I applaud them for attempting and documenting such a feat, which I'm sure was relatively time-consuming, and I admonish them for doing a piss-poor job of it.
(And, no: I don't care which browser "wins." I have most of the tested browsers installed on my own laptop, and for me, it would be instructive to know which one will conserve battery life best in times when I know I'll be without power for a long period of time.)
wrong test anyway (Score:2)
The very concept of testing browsers for battery life is deeply flawed, since it's the OS and hardware that govern it. That's where it should be tested, with a variety of different software loads.
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Apps can affect battery life. Hence Intel's PowerTOP effort. If Firefox does the same thing as IE but uses twice as many cycles then it's going to suck more juice.
Not having read the study, one thing they should definitely do (which they may have done) is fix the amount of work being done, instead of just looping each machine doing website loads. That is to say if Firefox loads pages 1.5x as fast as IE then figure out exactly how many IE loads it takes to kill the battery and have the Firefox test run on
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So you propose, AC, that adding more random noise to the test would improve the reliability of the results moreso than controlling the test environment?
I'm no statistician, either, but your proposal sounds like it would be more difficult (define "random" in this context, including time of day), more time-consuming, and less accurate.
Re:2% difference... big deal. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, seriously, who cares?
If you get 2 hours of battery time, this gains you about 2 minutes and half.
For 5 hours of battery time you get 6 minutes extra.
If you really want to extend battery time, turning down the screen brightness by a notch will probably have more effect.
Re:2% difference... big deal. (Score:4, Insightful)
You should use your favourite browser, because you'll be more productive in it.
Teach yourself to read or write 10% faster, and that'll dwarf the savings a different browser provides.
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Lolz. Ur FunnIE!
Seriously though... GP here has a point. There's going to be some variance here. And this comparison of "browsers" is misleading, and possibly stupid. I find it very hard to believe that the browser itself is responsible for much... if anything. Looking at the article, the biggest determining factor in battery life is indeed... Flash itself.
Considering there is a big difference in the flash plugin between browsers on the same platform... How about running this test with [*gasp*] no fla
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The testing methods aren't well explained either and the method used could bias the results. If the same laptop is used for every browser test, the browsers which are tested last will be at a disadvantage due to battery usage. Probably minor, but something that must be accounted for. Their method of simply reloading three tabs doesn't necessarily test normal internet usage either. It just indicates which browser eats the least amount of
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Now let's take a look at what you're saying I said. What I said: GP probably wouldn't have made his post if IE hadn't come out on top. What you said: there was one case that IE didn't come out on top, and it wasn't mentioned in the summary - and that somehow, this is something I accused GP of doing?
It's also worth pointing out that the
Battery life test (Score:4, Insightful)
So IE8 is more battery friendly? Is that before or after having to install a virus scanner to keep an eye on what IE is doing?
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IE8 in Vista/Windows 7 runs in a sandbox. Firefox doesn't. I'm not going to immediately say that IE8 is now more secure than FF, but I do believe that the security issues of IE6 aren't relevant anymore with the latest versions of IE.
The joke about IE being insecure is going to become as obsolete as the BSOD jokes, although I expect it to still be trotted out at Slashdot for years to come.
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Unfortunately, Vista's got BSoDs again. [tomshardware.com]
It's not obsolete as you thought it was. You should be careful about making remarks about IE8 for the same reasons.
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From XP onwards, BSODs will generally occur due to damaged/poorly-coded drivers or problematic hardware. I won't argue with you - BSODs are still around, but they're NOT as frequent as the Win 95/98 days. There are still a lot of people who joke about it as if it's a common problem, which it isn't.
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Firefox is more secure, but it seems to be some sort of social thing rather than a code thing.
Mac exploits are usually IM client exploits, or browser exploits. (Safari) Whenever I hear about pwn2own contests and stuff, it's Safari that gets punched wide open. Safari is arguably very secure, but it's still heavily attacked and constantly has vulnerabilities.
IE8, same thing. However, in the case of Windows, there are many attack vectors, so if IE8 (or its sandbox) gets too tough to crack, go at it some other
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I don't care whether my browser is power efficient or not i'm still not using it online without virus protection on a windows machine.
It's amazing the things people will put up with, when they're well-trained enough. They'll even adapt to the point where they don't notice the performance hit on nearly everything they do. I've been running antivirus free since I started computing - they use too many resources, and can even do more harm than good -- interfering with normal file operations at bad times, and similar.
I use Windows as my primary desktop; and I run a passive scan monthly or so under linux boot to make sure I didn't do some
Uhh.. whiskey tango foxtrot? (Score:2, Funny)
Slow news day, guys? I mean, seriously -- who is going to choose a browser based on how long it'll keep working in a laptop battery life test? And what's the control group for this test, anyway? In the real world, some guy decides he wants some ramen and suddenly my wifi connectivity goes to crap. What if it's really bright in the room and I have to turn the brightness up on the LCD? Well and truly, there's about a hundred things more important than which browser I'm using that affect battery life.
Now, I'm
I think... (Score:4, Insightful)
Given how far behind technically IE is otherwise, I think this is called "grasping at straws".
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[citation needed]
I'm aware that Google Chrome implements this, but last time I checked Firefox, Safari, and Opera do not.
And I say this as a Firefox user!
It seems the article also tested a netbook (Score:5, Informative)
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Clearly the summary writer is a retard that doesn't understand a netbook is a small laptop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netbook [wikipedia.org]
Netbooks (sometimes referred to as mini notebooks or subnotebooks) are a rapidly evolving[1] category of small, light and inexpensive laptop computers suited for general computing and accessing web-based applications;
I don't normally call people retards. I'm just pissed that the summary writers on my favourite sites, like slashdot, and hackaday, completely fail at summaries or fact checking anything. A few weeks back some Titanium article showed up, but the linked article was from 2007! Frak that. Hackaday mentioned an AVR(uzebox) movie player that "just came out"... a half year ago?
Bah, I've h
But what is the justification? (Score:3, Interesting)
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It's been my experience using Safari on OS X that Safari performs terribly if you are doing any sort of hard drive I/O, meaning if it is all that you are using, it's going to keep your HDD awake doing god knows what the whole time you're using it. Doing something simple like opening a new tab when logging into WoW takes forever and it's basically the reason why Chrome for mac can't come out soon enough. I'd love to see a similar comparison featuring FF, Chrome, Safari, and Opera on OS X to see if the result
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*Why* IE 8 gets better battery life than Safari?
Here's what they did:
"For testing, we load the three sites into tabs on our test web browser, wait 60 seconds, and then reload all three tabs."
And they've only done the test once, without making sure that *all* browsers get the *same* HTML and JS with the *same* CPU-hungry Flash ads.
Make your own conclusion.
In other news (Score:2)
Chrome beats other browsers by 4% in sound card usage.
Seriously, I don't think the "raw" laptop battery life means something else that what it means...
What would be somehow an interesting test is to measure the number of cycles/instructions a browser needs to:
* load a page.
* render a page.
* animate a page during 1 minutes.
Of course, with parallelism, it surely isn't as simple as that, but at least it would give an hint about the efficiency of your browser. Maybe someone can come with a more interesting test
I don't know about battery life, but... (Score:2)
I tried Opera a few months ago, but found that it broke formatting on a lot of sites that I frequent and had a lot
This is a better test. (Score:2)
A far better test metric would be CPU/mem/swap usage. If those 3 didn't have a direct relationship to battery life nothing will.
I would like to see the test run using lynx also.
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Firefox has been shown to make it so under not especially exotic conditions.
That's why it's number 1.
Too bad (Score:2)
/. homepage (Score:2)
Considering that it takes my poor Eee PC up to a minute to render the /. homepage at 100% cpu usage with FF3, I'm not surprised.
This makes sense - it's better integrated. (Score:3, Insightful)
Internet Explorer is 'just' a shell around Explorer - all the components it needs are pretty much there and often locked into memory (which means not swapped out, and disk access is the mindkiller I mean batter killer). I imagine this is sufficient to cover the difference.
Still not giving up my Flashblock+Adblock+Noscript though. Especially on the laptop.
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Okay, this is an obvious troll, or someone who didn't realize what the quotes around the 'just' signified, but http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa741312%28VS.85%29.aspx and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IExplore.svg for the non-trolls who actually care.
Now, I am not using IE8. Have not since I booted this morning (for weeks, even). Yet ShDocVW, BrowseUI, URLMon, MSXML, WinINET, etc are all loaded. The only things not already in memory are the Trident rendering engine(MSHTML) and iexplore.exe. If
New IE8 Commercial (Score:5, Funny)
Evil-Doer (played by Jerry Seinfeld): Agent Jack Bauer! How can this be? That laptop had three, maybe four minutes of battery life left on it, at most! How could you possibly have downloaded those files in time?!
Jack Bauer: Simple.
Bauer turns to face the camera, which quickly zooms in on his face.
Jack Bauer: I used Internet Explorer 8.
A giant explosion rocks the screen, and a huge Internet Explorer logo appears.
Announcer: Internet Explorer 8. Because on the Internet, seconds matter.
good news everyone, (Score:2)
Who cares? (Score:2)
Of course it does... (Score:4, Funny)
Irrelevant Test (Score:2)
Who the hell cares? It's like saying, "hitting yourself in the head with a brick will get you to sleep faster than counting sheep." Yes, they both get you to sleep, but take a guess which one I'd rather do.
But it needs windows (Score:2)
If you are that concerned about battery life that 2% from changing browser makes a difference then you should really consider using a more lightweight operating system. That would also allow you to run with decent performance on hardware better optimized for low power consumption.
Too Cool To Matter (Score:2)
> ...the poor Windows result probably won't matter to most Safari users.
Nothing matters to most Safari users. They're too cool.
Speaking as a scientist.... (Score:4, Insightful)
... those people aren't.
"Each test was run at least twice." If they were run at least 10 or 20 times you'd be able to estimate from the variance in the scores if the differences were significant.
The netbook had almost identical measures for all except Safari (caveat to significance, as above). Does anyone think it matters that the two laptops were running Vista and IE8, a fairly integrated collection of software, likely installed together, whereas all the others were thrown on top of an operating system that never could get the hang of running much more than itself.
Anyone want to put odds on whether the difference in drive activity in trying to (1) run MS operating system with MS vs. non-MS software and (2) run stuff installed together vs. installed after, would be proportional to the observed differences in battery life?
Firefox sucks on the Mac (Score:2)
On a Mac, Firefox will use somewhere around 1% extra CPU for each additonal document open, even if none of them have flash or animated images. For instance, right now, I have 34 documents open, and it's using 17% CPU constant (which is unusually low). Nothing's going on. I've checked all of the documents. No animations, and gmail is the only one with any active Javascript. I've compared it to Safari, and it'll use roughly 0% for the same load.
The reason I switched to Firefox is because its memory consu
I also suspect... (Score:2)
We suspect that Safari 4 does better under OS X, however,
Well, I'm guessing that IE8 performs very poorly under OS X.
Browsers and laptop battery life (Score:2)
I didn't realise that browsers regulated laptop battery life.
I thought battery life was controlled by the Operating System regulating such things as CPU clock speed on that particular computer.
Or is this report really talking about how many CPU clock cycles a browser uses to render a page?
If so then the report should be re-written to say what it means. As it stands the headline appears to be misleading.
Seriously flawed studay. (Score:2, Insightful)
Level Test Suite Had to be Tough (Score:2)
Who cares about the battery life? What I'd like to see was how they managed to find that variety of machinery and OS (etc), that ran the same background processes on hardware that had all the same components/performance and little things like voltage to each module of all units. And of course they must have made sure that all the operating systems were using the same shared libs and everything ... wow!!!!
No no no! (Score:3, Funny)
Infections last longer with IE8. Read the summary if not the article. Sheesh!
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That's the only platform they tested in this situation, it's not a surprise really.
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Your information is 4 years out of date. Explorer and IExplore are completely separate components.
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