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Microsoft Edge found to give up to 53% more battery life

By Marcus Wong - on 21 Jun 2016, 6:03pm

Microsoft Edge found to give up to 53% more battery life

 

Given the amount of time we spend online these days, it’s hardly surprising that our internet browsers are responsible for a large chunk of the energy usage on our laptops and tablets. Ever wondered which browser is the most energy efficient then? Well, the Microsoft Edge has just done a round of their own testing and concluded that their own browser is the most energy efficient, allowing you to do more browsing compared to Chrome, Firefox, or Opera on a Windows 10 device. 

Here’s their basic testing procedure:

First, they connected a Surface Book to specialized power monitoring equipment in a lab and measured the power usage during typical browsing activities like opening websites, scrolling through articles, and watching videos, opening new tabs for each task. Microsoft says the websites used for testing were the most common ones we used today with Facebook, Google, YouTube, Amazon, and Wikipedia among them. As you can see from the chart below, Microsoft Edge fares best on Windows 10, with up to 36-53% more battery life compared to the competition.

Next, they measured real world telemetry, getting data from millions of Windows 10 devices across the world via the Windows Energy Estimation Engine (E3). The E3 engine measures power consumption in your device across hardware, apps and services, taking advantage of the hardware management tools already present in the machine to accurately measure just how much power is consumed, hence giving an accurate assessment of power consumption due to real-world use, with the results as below.

Finally, three Surface Books had their browsers set to run the same tasks until their batteries died, with the entire process captured in the form of a time lapse video, which is provided below as a real-world illustration of the results. 

W3Counter’s latest browser and platform market share figures put Chrome firmly in the lead with a 58.7% share of the market (as of May 2016) with the next leading browser being Safari at a distant 12.7%. Meanwhile, Internet Explorer and Edge combine for just 10.3% market share, so perhaps this power-saving feature might convert some users who want to absolutely maximize their battery life. To find out more about the testing procedure, check out the Microsoft Edge blog.

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