Edge continues to dominate battery life - Firefox now is the worst. Chrome is second worst.

[GoodBytes]

You may recall several months ago, Microsoft showed how Edge had hands down the best battery life in terms of streaming video on mobile platform, and with a daring video comparison showing how it fairs using identical systems (Surface Books).

 

Since then, Opera pushed its battery saver feature, and Chrome worked a lot in improving is battery life in the latest Chrome when it comes on video playback, even doing another video doing its own video streaming test with Surface Book comparing the old version of Chrome and the latest one.

 

 

As Windows 10 Anniversary Update is now released to most people (still being distributed in waves, Microsoft estimates it will continue until November), the Edge team goes a step further.

They now provide more details on their tests, including source code of their test module so that anyone can run the test on their side and compare. On top of that, Edge got further battery improvement, AND on top of things, Edge was playing 1080p Netflix, while the other web browser was only rendering 720p.

 

The results are interesting. Firefox is now officially the worst web browser for video streaming for battery life, then Chrome, then Opera, and the best results Edge.

 

Microsoft in its blog posts says:

Quote

Back in June, we shared a look at Microsoft Edge’s industry-leading efficiency, which allows Microsoft Edge users to rely on more battery life than the other browsers we tested. With the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, we made a number of additional improvements to make Microsoft Edge last even longer, and today we’re rerunning our tests with the latest version of each tested browser to see how things match up.

 

At the risk of giving away the ending, the results may look familiar! With the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, Microsoft Edge is more efficient than ever, and still the best choice for extending your battery life on Windows 10 – up to 24%-43% more efficient than the competition for general purpose browsing, and lasting up to 23%-69% longer when streaming video.

 

More in details, the team behind Edge says that under simulated web surfing scenarios, the new version of Edge (the one in the Anniversary Update) is 12% more power efficient than the previous version.

 

 

Quote

From the moment we decided to revisit our tests, we were committed to measuring real-world scenarios with a completely transparent methodology. To back up our results, we’re open sourcing our lab test on GitHub and publishing the full methodology for our video tests, so anyone can see the setup and even reproduce the tests independently.

 

While we’ve open sourced the tests and made some minor updates to maintain compatibility with updates to third party browsers, our approach is very similar to our previous tests. We measured efficiency in a few different ways:

 

In our lab test, we simulated common real-world activities like searching, watching videos, shopping, and reading e-mail, using multiple tabs with background activity to simulate a natural browsing session and measuring power consumption directly with hardware instrumentation. We’ve open-sourced this full test, and you can see everything you need to reproduce the lab tests for yourself on our GitHub repository here, or review the methodology document here.

 

Next, we repeated our video rundown test, looping a streaming video on a range of identical devices and recording when each died. You can find the video test methodology documented here (Netflix test) and here (Vimeo test).

 

Source 1: http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/15/12926524/microsoft-edge-chrome-battery-response-tests

Source 2: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/09/15/edge-battery-anniversary-update/#f6sqtEZ36TeJTzTA.97

Source code of test: https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/BrowserEfficiencyTest/releases/tag/bloggedVersion

 

So what is coming form Edge?

Well looking under the latest Insider Preview of Windows 10 (Redstone 2 update - Build 14926).

HTML5Test (https://html5test.com/), the web browser gets: 481 out of 555 points under HTML5 test.

Under Firefox 48.0.2, the web browser gets a score of 459 out of 555

As for Chrome: 499 out of 555

 

So, still works need to be done on the web browser engine for increasing its HTML5 support, however it past the latest version of Firefox.

We will see how this fairs when Redstone is officially released in March 2017.

 

From HTML5Test:

 

The web browser is moving fast. Still works need to be done throughout, and missing basic features like not keeping the rendered pages in memory when you move back or forward on a web page like it does in Firefox for instant navigation. But the web browser is getting there.

 

Microsoft has a lot of convincing to do as Chrome is continuing to grow in popularity and Edge growing but slowly.

The web browser, last year, based on netmarketshare.com had 2.67%, now it reached 5.16%. Safari, Firefox, and IE is decreasing, Chrome has 53.97% market share, while it was 31.12% last year (well in October).

https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1&qpcustomb=0

 

Are you considering switching web browser? If so, from which to which?

 

 

[pagani123]

huh good thing my desktop has a cord  

[NumLock21]

1 minute ago, Maybach123 said:

huh good thing my desktop has a cord  

My laptop has a cord too.

 

[KuJoe]

Better performance, better quality, and better battery life... MS needs to port this over to Android so I can completely get rid of Chrome.

[Dietrichw]

I like Edge but it will lock up too often and just not work well with many websites. I want to ditch chrome but I can't as Edge doesn't compare in reliability.

[DarkBlade2117]

I like FireFox though ):

[dalekphalm]

8 minutes ago, DarkBlade2117 said:

I like FireFox though ):

I vastly prefer the FireFox UI over Chrome, but I've been having on and off FireFox issues for ages.

 

YouTube issues, freezing and stitching/stuttering issues, etc. On multiple computers with wildly different configurations. I really don't want to use Chrome.

[DarkBlade2117]

Just now, dalekphalm said:

I vastly prefer the FireFox UI over Chrome, but I've been having on and off FireFox issues for ages.

 

YouTube issues, freezing and stitching/stuttering issues, etc. On multiple computers with wildly different configurations. I really don't want to use Chrome.

Ya I do have a small issue with YouTube where it doesn't want to type in a comment. There is a fix that works.

[dalekphalm]

Just now, DarkBlade2117 said:

Ya I do have a small issue with YouTube where it doesn't want to type in a comment. There is a fix that works.

My issues with YouTube usually resolve around a video taking several seconds (up to 30, in random cases) to start playing. And FireFox used to constantly crash YoUTube videos. It was worse w/ Flash videos, but even HTML5 player crashes sometimes on FireFox. Annoying.

[Energycore]

What's battery life? My computer can only stay on for 17ms after the power cuts

[Energycore]

7 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

My issues with YouTube usually resolve around a video taking several seconds (up to 30, in random cases) to start playing. And FireFox used to constantly crash YoUTube videos. It was worse w/ Flash videos, but even HTML5 player crashes sometimes on FireFox. Annoying.

It was really bad but now it's fine, haven't had a crash on a video since may

[LAwLz]

Too bad Edge is a huge piece of shit and not worth using despite the better battery life.

It might suck the least battery, but it sucks the most at basically everything else.

[dalekphalm]

5 minutes ago, Energycore said:

It was really bad but now it's fine, haven't had a crash on a video since may

I still have occasional HTML5 crashing on FireFox over a variety of systems, but it's not as bad as it used to be.

[Energycore]

2 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

I still have occasional HTML5 crashing on FireFox over a variety of systems, but it's not as bad as it used to be.

Hmm, maybe I just lucked out.

 

To be fair Firefox was much less stable back when I had ABP on it. ublock origin is better at keeping it stable

[Delicieuxz]

I'm all for good web browser benchmark data, I'd just prefer to get it from a source other than a youtube account called Microsoft Edge, presumably operated by Microsoft, who hasn't exactly been fair and unbiased with any of their marketing surrounding Windows 10, or their methods employed to get people using it.

 

Also, the video has a faded disclaimer that says "individual results may vary", and commenting for the video has been disabled.

[Mr.Meerkat]

10 minutes ago, Energycore said:

What's battery life? My computer can only stay on for 17ms after the power cuts

Well my computer can stay on for 20ms so...I think my PC is better...

[AlexGoesHigh]

Not to dismiss the miles of work MS has done in year and a half since announcing Edge but man does Edge still has a hefty list of user features that need to work, in the last two years i went from chrome to waterfox (64bit firefox) to opera for over a year and now i'm back to chrome since  2 months ago and while chrome 53 made good fixes, there are still some annoyances i would like to go away but alas i have more fucking problems with other browsers that i have with chrome, firefox crashes more often that i would like, otherwise it freezes a lot, opera well they sold out to a china corp it's going to be a matter of time before they either turns into a data whore worst that chrome or turns into shit, Edge like i said lacks a lot of user features, tbh i think currently all browsers are quite shit

[Energycore]

Just now, Mr.Meerkat said:

Well my computer can stay on for 20ms so...I think my PC is better...

Wow, that's 17% better than mine. What's your secret?

[Sakkura]

2 minutes ago, Delicieuxz said:

I'm all for good web browser benchmark data, I'd just prefer to get it from a source other than a youtube account called Microsoft Edge, presumably operated by Microsoft, who hasn't exactly been fair and unbiased with any of their marketing surrounding Windows 10, or their methods employed to get people using it.

Not to mention their past dealings in the browser wars. Netscape Navigator did not just up and die out of nowhere.

[AlexGoesHigh]

1 minute ago, Delicieuxz said:

I'm all for good web browser benchmark data, I'd just prefer to get it from a source other than a youtube account called Microsoft Edge, presumably operated by Microsoft, who hasn't exactly been fair and unbiased with any of their marketing surrounding Windows 10, or their methods employed to get people using it.

that is why they released a doc with all the info on how to reproduce their tests, and they open sourced their benchmark, MS has a shit ton of crap of then but these claims have actual data to back them up, for i dunno how long they are not throwing shit at us in this case.

[Mr.Meerkat]

9 minutes ago, Energycore said:

Wow, that's 17% better than mine. What's your secret?

You know...get a plat rated PSU  (and on a more serious note, it's only got a hold up time of 18.8ms ;-;)

[Energycore]

1 minute ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

You know...get a plat rated PSU  (and on a more serious note, it's only got a hold up time of 18.8ms ;-;)

If I had tho money, I would get a Seasonic PRIME PSU those got something like 40ms hold-up time

[Mr.Meerkat]

Just now, Energycore said:

If I had tho money, I would get a Seasonic PRIME PSU those got something like 40ms hold-up time

Well my XTS is best PSU...from XFX so I'm fine for noow  

[dfsdfgfkjsefoiqzemnd]

I'll believe it when I see a comparison on a neutral OS.  Wouldn't be surprised it MS actively sabotages non-MS browsers on an OS level in an attempt to get people to use the trainwreck that is Edge.

[Dabombinable]

I saw battery life improvements updating to the anniversary update, not by switching from Firefox to Edge-that made the laptop run warmer in my lap and drained the battery faster. Its still not true for all devices. At all.