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Chrome Google Microsoft Power Software

Chrome For Windows To Get Battery Performance Boost (zdnet.com) 34

Earlier this year, Microsoft claimed that its Edge browser was much lighter on battery than Chrome. Google is now attempting to address that. It has announced that Chrome 53 will contain numerous CPU and GPU power consumption enhancements for video playback, along with other big performance and power improvements. ZDNet adds: Google hasn't as yet published any test results to back up these claims, and I'm not expecting that Chrome will have closed the gap with Edge in one leap, but it's good that Google is addressing these issues. Along with battery life improvements, Google has made what it calls "material design" changes to Chrome, in the form of tweaking the user interface.
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Chrome For Windows To Get Battery Performance Boost

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    As things are with Google, this will remain a half-finished work in progress, be incredibly clunky, and then be abruptly discontinued for no good reason. That's how Google operates with everything else other than their ad revenue, so I expect this to be half-assed as well.

    • by FatdogHaiku ( 978357 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @03:02PM (#52830325)

      As things are with Google, this will remain a half-finished work in progress, be incredibly clunky, and then be abruptly discontinued for no good reason. That's how Google operates with everything else other than their ad revenue, so I expect this to be half-assed as well.

      I could not disagree more. Google goes to great lengths to make something reliable and usable, sometimes spending years getting everything just right.
      Then they discontinue and bury it...

    • by thsths ( 31372 )

      I absolutely agree. They tend to be very good with great announcements, and often they do make a lot of sense. But following through is another matter - and it very rarely happens.

      Now at least I think Chrome is pretty safe, and will not be discontinued anytime soon. But it was always CPU heavy, and probably will always be.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Your spyware is still not going on my computer... #edge4life

    • by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @04:42PM (#52830837)

      I guess I probably should mention that Edge sends every search term and link you click to Microsoft for Bing analytics, and there is no way to avoid it, unlike in Chrome where you can switch to Chromium without losing anything. Microsoft also wanted to be in the ad business just like Google, and even spent some $7 billion towards that end, but ultimately failed. Though that failure wasn't as spectacular as the $20+ billion net loss they made on Windows Phone, which they hide on their financial statements by patent trolling Android OEMs and listing it as phone division revenue.

  • So it was worse? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Carewolf ( 581105 ) on Monday September 05, 2016 @03:06PM (#52830347) Homepage

    Didn't Google claim Microsoft was wrong and Edge was not better than Chrome, and now they have closed the gap?

    Lovely mismatch of messages from PR and from actual engineers.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Didn't Google claim Microsoft was wrong and Edge was not better than Chrome,

      [Citation Needed] Because AFAIK it was Opera who said Microsoft was wrong, not Google. And in fact at the time, people on /. agreed that Edge was in fact better than Chrome on battery life, especially on video. That's precisely why MS chose video in a constant loop to prove its superiority*.

      and now they have closed the gap?

      They didn't make that claim either. So, nice strawman you're making if it turns out their actual claims made

    • by donaldm ( 919619 )

      Didn't Google claim Microsoft was wrong and Edge was not better than Chrome, and now they have closed the gap?

      Lovely mismatch of messages from PR and from actual engineers.

      You can do the HTML5test [html5test.com] and Chrome should get 499 (this is for Fedora 24) out of 555 compared to 485 for Microsoft's Edge browser.

      Numbers don't really mean anything unless you look at the fine print and by that take a look at what each browser supports since you can do a side by side comparison of different web browsers. As an example, I am also going to use "QupZilla" (score: 480/555) which comes standard along with "Firefox" if you install Fedora 24 KDE spin.

      If you do an intercomparison on what eac

  • I still remember that earlier versions of Chrome had this feature (some may call it a bug) that modified a tic count in Windows such that Chrome became faster and more responsive by trading off consumed power. Whether the application was being shown or not was not part of the equation. Chrome devs are having a change of heart now that Microsoft, none the less, has beaten them in at least one metric.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Ditto. The new Chrome fixes this totally. Fans stop running just because Chrome is open.

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      The only reason edge is more efficient than chrome on windows and only chrome on windows is because elements of edge are embedded in the operating system and still run, sucking up power when chrome runs. Typical M$ marketing scam, not done for any reasons of efficiency and those elements do not need to run unless you need to use the browser but it ensures any competing browsers use more power because of those unused modules running in the background, likely spying into network connections and transferring

  • ... Chrome now comes with a battery to boost performance.
    • That's not the issue. I use uBlock (and have tried others) but prior to v53 Chrome would spin the fans all the time, just sitting there doing nothing. Now with v53 my laptop and my Surface 4 both sit quietly.

  • Chrome is a battery and CPU hog on mobile too.

    • I use Firefox Beta for Android, and despite the odd crash here (it /is/ beta) and there it doesn't seem to use much power.

      Wifi, Display and Cell Standby are the biggest battery suckers (in that order).

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Glad to see Google addressing the problems with Chrome and power consumption. But is it driving users to Edge I think not. I am not a huge fan of Chrome, but I use it because it's popular and I know most web developers will at least make sure Chrome works. I have found a number of sites where Edge was never even verified let alone supported. Firefox is junk anymore couldn't use it if I wanted too, and I guess IE 11 is an option since I find it better than Edge. You look at the MSDN forums and plenty complai

  • Windows detects when Edge is running and only then switches on battery saver mode. It wouldn't be the first time Microsoft was caught tweaking the OS to make using another browser a jolting experience. In the case of Opera they included browser detection code that shifted fonts 2 pixels to the left.

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