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Microsoft Chrome Software The Internet Hardware

Microsoft Says Edge Browser Is More Power-Efficient Than Chrome (windows.com) 260

Posted by msmash from the saving-power dept.
An anonymous reader writes: It's no secret that Google's Chrome browser eats up a considerable amount of memory (and by extension, battery). On Monday, Microsoft announced that its Edge browser has succeeded on that front. Citing several tests, Microsoft claims Edge browser is a better choice for portable device owners. The company took four identical laptops running Windows 10 to see which of the four most popular browsers would be most efficient when it comes to battery life. Interestingly, Chrome was the first to kill the laptop in the video streaming test at 4 hours and 19 minutes. Firefox closely followed its rival at 5 hours and 9 minutes, while Opera (running on the same tech as Chrome) managed to hit 6 hours and 18 minutes. In Microsoft's tests, it was found that Edge was best of the bunch when it came to enjoying a video online, lasting for 7 hours and 22 minutes. That's worked out to be 70% longer than Chrome.In a blog post, Microsoft wrote: "We designed Microsoft Edge from the ground up to prioritize power efficiency and deliver more battery life, without any special battery saving mode or changes to the default settings. Our testing and data show that you can simply browse longer with Microsoft Edge than with Chrome, Firefox, or Opera on Windows 10 devices."
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Microsoft Says Edge Browser Is More Power-Efficient Than Chrome More

Microsoft Says Edge Browser Is More Power-Efficient Than Chrome

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  • Dear Microsoft (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20, 2016 @10:52AM (#52351955)

    Stop trying to make "Edge" happen. It's not going to happen.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      But I like edging ...

    • Re:Dear Microsoft (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @11:24AM (#52352177) Journal

      Indeed. I'm willing to put up with a bit more power drain to have a browser that actually works. Edge is just terrible.

    • Seriously, I snorted my coffee when I read that. Well played.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      I haven't used it yet. Maybe I will have to use it to download Firefox in the future.

      Just because a browser is power-efficient doesn't mean that it's smart or useful.

  • Even better (Score:5, Funny)

    by alexhs ( 877055 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @10:52AM (#52351959) Homepage Journal

    And Lynx was the most power-efficient of them all.

  • But it runs on Windows! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Archtech ( 159117 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @10:53AM (#52351967)

    "Microsoft Says Edge Browser Is More Power-Efficient Than Chrome"

    But then almost anything is more power-efficient than Windows. So Chrome on Linux probably beats Edge on Windows hands down. Propaganda is largely a matter of choosing what you want to emphasize and being carefully not to mention anything else.

    • Re:But it runs on Windows! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20, 2016 @11:04AM (#52352047)

      Actually, Edge on Linux uses no power at all.

    • Re:But it runs on Windows! (Score:5, Informative)

      by clockley(571021718) ( 3772455 ) <(clockley1) (at) (gmail.com)> on Monday June 20, 2016 @11:06AM (#52352073)
      Windows and Linux use about the same amount of power. Linux being less efficient sometimes. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p... [phoronix.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by CRC'99 ( 96526 )

        Windows and Linux use about the same amount of power. Linux being less efficient sometimes.

        http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p... [phoronix.com]

        Sorry - but I have to argue here... I have a Dell Inspiron 15 laptop - Windows 10 gives me ~5 hours of battery life. Fedora 24 gives me nearly 8. And yes - I have measured.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Junta ( 36770 )

          In general, at a low level Intel and MS have worked a bit more so that power management features still usually land in Microsoft first still. Even when they land in Linux, the functionality is frequently not correctly used for a long time.

          On the flipside, MS tends to do more uncontrolled behind the scenes crap. In a stock Windows install, there will be antivirus examining most disk I/O, update checking spawning at annoyingly arbitrary times, etc. If a linux were up to the same degree of BS background act

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by e r ( 2847683 )
          I'm a longtime Linux user and every article I've seen decries Linux's extremely poor power management especially on Laptops.
          Can you go into more detail on your setup?
          Did you install any custom or non-standard kernels modules?
          Any specific config tweaks?
          What version of W10?

      • Depends on what you do with the Linux install, which distro, etc.

        A bog-standard Ubuntu install with all the bells and whistles will suck down the battery just as fast as Windows. However, a carefully tuned kernel and a leaner GUI stack (say, something like the old Fluxbox [fluxbox.org])? You'd have something that really sips power when compared to windows.

        Maybe the younger generation just plain forgot that Linux can be customized and stripped for better performance and battery life?

        • A bog-standard Ubuntu install with all the bells and whistles will suck down the battery just as fast as Windows. However, a carefully tuned kernel and a leaner GUI stack (say, something like the old Fluxbox)? You'd have something that really sips power when compared to windows.

          That's assuming that you've actually got the power management working correctly, which especially on Linux is not a foregone conclusion on most platforms... especially AMD-based ones.

      • Windows and Linux use about the same amount of power. Linux being less efficient sometimes.

        http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p... [phoronix.com]

        I think you're over estimating the ability for edge to start let alone play 4 videos at the same time while running on Linux.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lazarus ( 2879 )

      Other browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera) are all cross-platform. Edge is not. The most they can say is that Edge is the most power efficient running on Windows. I suspect (as you do) that this would not be the case running on anything else as it wouldn't be as tightly integrated.

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @11:10AM (#52352097)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Perhaps a chrome book might be more efficient running chrome OS or linux than if you installed windows on it. But linux ACPI support is terrible on windows laptops. Mostly because the manufacturers only support windows. At best, we can capture and replicate the order and content messages sent by windows drivers to the hardware. But linux developers just don't have the manpower and knowledge of the internals to approach the same (or better) power usage.

  • Maybe when comparing to stock Chrome... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Maybe it's faster when comparing to stock Chrome, but I'd bet that you throw an Adblocker on Chrome and it blows Edge's socks off in real-world usage. Since there are no add-ons for Edge, it's dead in the water.

  • Not that I can compare it but my lumia 950 is always running dry, despite being on power saver from 100% and background data etc off. Let's just have a quick look at battery usage over last 24 hours.

    System 57.1%
    Display 38.3%

    Seems high but ok

    Apps (top 3)
    Edge 86.5%
    Groove music (also shit) 4.1%
    File explorer 2.8%

    It's not even as if I'm a heavy. About average I'd say maybe less and I only ever really keep a maximum of six tabs open, but still edge drinks up that power and doesn't have anything to sh
  • The very first thing I do on my Win10 machines is to use Edge to go to the Chrome download page. Then I turn it off, unpin it, never open it again and set Chrome as my default browser. About 2 minutes in from Chrome startup, it starts using more and more power than Edge ever will on that machine. I can safely say it has now used north of 100kWh than Edge on those machines. And will happily increase.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 )

      And then, when there's a major update, all of a sudden your defaulted back to Edge.

  • Textbook example of how to game a test. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @11:00AM (#52352021) Journal
    They pick a bench mark test, run it, profile the code, and optimize it to beat the test. Sort of like how car companies tout a huge EPA MPG and then weasel out saying your mileage might vary. The real test would be to record normal browsing habits or a large cross section of people, and then repeat exactly the same mouse clicks and key board input to various browsers and then check the battery endurance.

    • They weren't even browsing. They were playing a video. They tested the power consumption of the -video player- and claimed it was great test of the -browser-. Why did they release this test? Probably because the ones that involved browsing showed Edge to be a major loser.

      • Reading between the lines: "We noticed streaming video players mostly ran in Silverlight, because Hollywood insists on decoding streamed video in a Silverlight encrypted virtual machine.* So we scheduled a meeting with the Silverlight dev team and got them to make some power optimization tweaks to it, but only activated these optimizations in Edge, not in other browsers."

        * If they sent a raw unencrypted stream, you could capture the stream and have a copy of the movie. But decrypting the stream in a v

      • They weren't even browsing. They were playing a video.

        You do realise that playing youtube videos more common than actually browsing the internet right? I mean we're a bit old fashioned here on Slashdot typing comments into text boxes, and even Dice tried to give us videos to watch instead.

      • -1 overrated. Know how I know you didn't read the article? I'm not even going to do a summary here, just know you're wrong. Here's a hint, there's more in the article than in the summary. You wasted your time, my time, and I assume 3 mod points, because its only at 4.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

      They pick a bench mark test, run it, profile the code, and optimize it to beat the test... The real test would be to record normal browsing habits or a large cross section of people, and then repeat exactly the same mouse clicks and key board input to various browsers and then check the battery endurance.

      From the article: "Second, we examined the real-world energy telemetry from millions of Windows 10 devices."

    • As much as you're right about gaming tests I don't at all doubt the actual result of this one.

      A browser that is a bit of a resource hog, vs one that's unlikely to actually render the page in the first place? Yeah I'll pick the latter for good battery performance.

      I just did a quick sense check on this too. Loaded up a 4k youtube video and checked CPU usage. ~20% utilisation on chrome (variance from 15-27%), ~8% utilisation on edge (variance from 6-10%). So I believe the numbers. ..... I'm still not going to

    • No. There is something to Edge's efficiency. At least vs Chrome I've noticed it.

      I have an old Lenovo S10e with an SSD and 2GB Ram running Windows 10, running on a first gen Atom Processor. When I installed Chrome on it it would take minutes before the main windows for chrome would show up. same goes for IE. Edge however would take up to 15 seconds tops. It also ran much better than chrome when browsing sites performance wise. Pages came up faster, video played smoother and pages would scroll smoother than C

  • And with room for improvement! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @11:06AM (#52352065)

    Just think how much more efficient it could be if it didn't have to drag all that telemetry baggage with it all the time!

    • Re:And with room for improvement! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Hardhead_7 ( 987030 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @11:18AM (#52352143)
      Exactly! At least with Google I know that they're not tracking anything I do through my web browser. Oh, wait...
      • Firefox also has some telemetry but you can disable it in about:config or, better yet, by using a user.js file. One pretty good summary of privacy and security settings is here [ghacks.net]. I notice, however, that many of these telemetry settings are turned off by default in the mobile version of Firefox, at least the beta version. That's ironic in a way, because the standard excuse companies use when people find unexpected telemetry or back doors is to say "Oops, that was just supposed to be in test versions of the

    • Just think how much more efficient it could be if it didn't have to drag all that telemetry baggage with it all the time!

      That is probably how they beat Chrome, since Chrome has a lot more telemetry than Edge.

      Did you known Google Chrome does A/B testing with optimizations and architecture redesigns, enabling some at random and then reporting back to Google how often they crash or cause other issues?

  • Jules (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 20, 2016 @11:06AM (#52352067)

    "Microsoft Says Edge Browser Is More Power-Efficient Than Chrome"

    Hey, sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I'd never know 'cause I wouldn't eat the filthy motherfucker.

  • Who cares? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ilsaloving ( 1534307 )

    I don't care of gives me the ability to poop gold bullion. I'm never going to use it. It's a Windows-only browser that was written by Microsoft, and not only that it's only available for Windows 10.

    Microsoft already demonstrated with Internet Explorer, that they will happily turn the internet into a filthy Windows-centric cesspool the second they are given the opportunity. The last thing we want to do is give them the opportunity to try again. The fact that it only works on Windows 10 (which is another nigh

    • Unfortunately, most users buy into the Microsoft propaganda machine, hook, line and sinker.

    • I don't care of gives me the ability to poop gold bullion. I'm never going to use it.

      I would be willing to use any browser if it provided me with a regular source of gold bullion.

  • ... because Edge only runs on Windows so, being unable to run on those operating systems, we could say it uses zero energy.

  • Interestingly, Chrome was the first to kill the laptop in the video streaming test at 4 hours and 19 minutes. Firefox closely followed its rival at 5 hours and 9 minutes, while Opera (running on the same tech as Chrome) managed to hit 6 hours and 18 minutes. In Microsoft's tests, it was found that Edge was best of the bunch when it came to enjoying a video online, lasting for 7 hours and 22 minutes.

    Was this an HTML5 video, or was it playing in Flash player or some other plugin? It doesn't seem to say in th

  • Interesting but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by evolutionary ( 933064 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @11:21AM (#52352157)
    In my experience, functionality trumps cpu cycle efficiency. Also, MS's test are likely rigged in favor of their browser. (like in most other industries to be fair). It's curious how notice the Vivaldi browser wasn't included in these benchmarks, which is the fastest browser I've tried to date. MS seems so desperate to be relevant in a tech sector they have been consistently losing ground on for YEARS, first to Firefox, then to chrome. Even with a rigged OS favoring Edge/Bing, MS can't seem to shake the shadow of Google or Mozilla. Their investors should be demanding that they shop in this futile battle, and try something that is actually groundbreaking where they MIGHT have a chance to dominate if they get in before some smart 3rd university student get's in on the action. :D

    • Their investors should be demanding that they shop in this futile battle, and try something that is actually groundbreaking where they MIGHT have a chance to dominate if they get in before some smart 3rd university student get's in on the action. :D

      When has Microsoft ever done that, though? Their investors should be demanding that they buy something that is actually groundbreaking, Microsoft has managed that before and could probably do it again.

  • If that's all they got... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @11:31AM (#52352227)
    If Microsoft is crowing only about power usage, it is an implicit admission that the Edge browser really sucks at everything else, like browsing, its main purpose in life.

  • Compare w/Opera's New Power-Saving Mode? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wile_e_wonka ( 934864 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @11:32AM (#52352235)

    Personally, I am wondering how the results would stack up with Opera thrown in with the power saving mode [opera.com] turned on.

    The article points out that Edge does pretty darn well without the need for any power saving mode. Like, ok, but perhaps it makes sense to have a full featured, powerful browser (which Opera is becoming again, though for a long time that was really questionable) with the ability to flip a switch that reduces the "power" (reducing activity of background tabs, wake CPU less often, pause unused extensions, etc) and increases battery life. Also there's the built in ad-blocker, which I'd think would substantially reduce power consumption.

    Please re-run the test.

  • Edge is an under-powered browser.

    Go home Nadella, you're drunk.

    Edge sucks, and I like Microsoft.

  • No Ublock Origin == not using Edge.

  • Benchmarks? (Score:5, Funny)

    by MAXOMENOS ( 9802 ) <mike&mikesmithfororegon,com> on Monday June 20, 2016 @11:52AM (#52352381) Homepage
    "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and benchmarks." --- Jon "Maddog" Hall, Atlanta, GA, 1999

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

      "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and benchmarks." --- Jon "Maddog" Hall, Atlanta, GA, 1999

      From the article: "we examined the real-world energy telemetry from millions of Windows 10 devices"

      So it's statistics, not benchmarks.

  • Does Edge have a decent adblocker to block all that cpu-munching JavaScript ads? No? Then any power savings are theoretical only

  • How about focusing on making edge more standards-compliant instead of worrying about battery?

  • Stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fnj ( 64210 ) on Monday June 20, 2016 @12:19PM (#52352601)

    It's no secret that Google's Chrome browser eats up a considerable amount of memory (and by extension, battery).

    First sentence of summary is a MASSIVE FAIL. Using RAM is not what wastes power. Using CPU wastes power.

  • I won' t use either Chrome or Edge because I think it's a conflict of interest for a web browser developer to also be in the user tracking, behavioral marketing, advertising and search businesses. A web browser needs to balance the interests of users and content providers.

  • That's like saying Popeye has better eyesight than a blind person.

  • Most people are perfectly willing to burn battery power on the things they want to do.

    People buy computers---including premium features like battery life---to run what they want. Or they buy accessories after the fact like DC chargers and spare batteries.

    At most, this article made me consider Opera as an alternative to Chrome, as it is equally functional and perhaps less demanding.

    From a security standpoint, I am fine with almost anything that replaces Internet Explorer. But seriously, everyone who really w

  • You know what's even more efficient that using Microsoft Edge? Not using it.

    I've heard that actually improves the web experience a bit too.

  • Given it doesn't have an add blocker yet and whenever I open a page with it (mostly) I'm assaulted by 50 video ads running simultaneously, I find that very hard to believe.

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