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Google Chrome Bests Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Opera In Independent Battery Life Tests (betanews.com) 114

Posted by msmash from the getting-to-the-bottom-of-things dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: YouTuber Linus Tech Tips has pitted Microsoft Edge against Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera and discovered that it does not deliver as strong a performance as Microsoft claims. Linus Tech Tips took four Dell Inspiron laptops, with the same specs, and found that Microsoft Edge trails Chrome and Opera in battery life tests. It would seem that it still beats Firefox, after all. However, the results are much, much closer than what Microsoft's own tests indicate. On average, the difference between Chrome, which offers the best battery life, and Microsoft Edge is under 40 minutes. Opera comes closer to Microsoft Edge than Chrome in this test. Even Creators Update, which based on Microsoft's test should help Microsoft Edge obliterate the competition, didn't help make it faster than Chrome. Linus says he used the same methodology that Microsoft used in its set of battery tests earlier this year, in which it declared Edge as the winner.
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Google Chrome Bests Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Opera In Independent Battery Life Tests More

Google Chrome Bests Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Opera In Independent Battery Life Tests

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  • Manufacturers lie about their products... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Monday June 26, 2017 @09:05AM (#54691003)

    What else is new. In particular, about everything MS praises in Windows is either bogus or actually a disadvantage.

    • But marketing is king, and being able to make people believe your product is better has nothing to do with your product being actually better.
  • How many times has Microsoft made false claims about it's browser, all their IE/Edge press BS originates from contrived statistics or benchmarks. You can never trust them and they will never change.

    • It's unfair to say that the original claims were false based on the new tests. The new tests ran different versions of the browsers. Since Microsoft started bleating about battery life, the other browsers started paying attention to their power usage. Chrome has probably doubled its version number since MS first spoke about it. OK not really, but they have had enough time to close the gap (assuming one really existed).

      The new test also ran on different hardware than Microsoft used. Most importantly, the Ins

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tomxor ( 2379126 )

        All this isn't to say that some funny business didn't go on in Microsoft's test, but it seems less likely considering that they did publish their test procedure so that it could be duplicated by others. That said, it would not surprise me if there is such a wide variation in each run that Microsoft didn't choose the best one that supports their browser.

        dude... that's the point, I'm not giving MS benefit of the doubt, they repeatedly cheated in these things, you give them way too much credit by suggesting others are more likely to purposely disadvantage them in a test. MS will do contrive an unfair test at the drop of a hat... every single time.

        • And yet they published everything that you needed to use to reproduce the tests and none of the other browser manufacturers demonstrated that it was wrong. They did however improve their battery usage in subsequent versions. Do you think that the browser makers would go to that trouble instead of taking the easier path and just producing their own results?

          If you want to say they have cheated then show the evidence. And no, doing the tests of browsers that are four versions older than Microsoft used is not g

    • It is at least somewhat surprising, considering that Microsoft has been advertising this "fact" in the Windows 10 Notification Center for months if you happen to be a Chrome user.

      Why would Microsoft tell this lie to millions of people using Chrome in Windows 10, knowing that at least a small percentage of them have to means to prove that it's BS?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tomxor ( 2379126 )
        Perhaps isn't not as wide spread as before but they have publically anounced similar performance and security related comparisons putting IEDGE on top, they have all been debunked - I suppose the difference is that was probably only towards a mostly developer community.

  • Safari beats Edge on the latest versions of macOS.

    • Safari beats Edge on the latest versions of macOS.

      And I'm DAMN sure it beats resource-hogging Chrome.

  • Something Something, Car Emission Reports...

  • Testing methodology (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TWX ( 665546 ) on Monday June 26, 2017 @09:09AM (#54691023)

    So did the reviewer, upon completing the first round with the four machines, then rotate the software under-test across the machines, rerun, rotate again, rerun, etc?

    What were the parameters of the test? Was this some kind of scripting that compelled the browser to pull content without user interaction? How was that achieved, and could extra usage from that software have skewed results? What content was pulled-down? Were different kinds of content, reflecting different kinds of users/usage pulled-down?

    I ask all of this because it affects the results. A single browser on a single laptop is a sample size of one. If the testing involved four out-of-the-box laptops with new batteries an dfour browsers, then one has a single data point for each browser. More testing is probably necessary to establish real results instead of just generating fanboy arguments.

    • This is Linus Tech Tips. It's entertainment. I wouldn't take it too seriously.

      • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Maybe, but Linus did everything that GP asked for.

        Meanwhile, Microsoft didn't in their own tests, and in fact used just a sample size of one. If anything, I wouldn't take Microsoft's numbers seriously.

        • ...is open source Edge.

          Microsoft, you must abandon hope that you will regain any market share with a closed source browser locked to Windows 10. It will never, never happen.

          When independent ports of Edge emerge on OSX, Ubuntu, Dragonfly, and Haiku, then perhaps there will be hope - and not one day before.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If you watch the video, he uses 4 laptops. Does a base run to get battery life for all of them. Then does one browser on all four, then does each browser on each laptop, multiple times, before and after the latest windows 10 'service pack'. Seems pretty well done to me. YMMV

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Fulfills scientific standards IMO, as long as absolute accuracy is not a factor. For relative measurements, this is entirely fine.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Didn't watch the video, but TFA mentions a 40 minutes difference which strongly indicates that they don't know what they are doing. 40 minutes is meaningless, maybe Edge lasted 1 minute and Chrome lasted 41 minutes. If they had a clue they would have expressed it as a percentage.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by wbo ( 1172247 )
      I wonder how the power profile settings were configured on the machines. Edge and IE altar their behavior quite significantly depending on how those settings are configured. Last I checked, Chrome outright ignores most of those settings while Firefox at least attempts to respect some of them.

      Settings such as minimum Javascript timer frequency, GPU power profile (impacts GPU compositing) can have a big impact on battery life.

      Also important is whether or not the power profile was set to throttle the C

    • So did the reviewer, upon completing the first round with the four machines, then rotate the software under-test across the machines, rerun, rotate again, rerun, etc?

      I watched the video, and yes, they rotated the tests. They first ran multiple baselines on each machine to identify the variances and weed out any dud machines. Then they ran the test multiple times on each machine, using each of the four browsers multiple times. This testing took a long, long time, because they had to wait for all of the laptops' batteries to run dry before ending each test, then fully charge them before the next test.

      What were the parameters of the test? Was this some kind of scripting that compelled the browser to pull content without user interaction? How was that achieved, and could extra usage from that software have skewed results? What content was pulled-down? Were different kinds of content, reflecting different kinds of users/usage pulled-down?

      He explains the test parameters within the first few minutes of the v

  • Er...keep performing your little laptop tests, but most web browsing seems to happen on phones these days.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hentes ( 2461350 )

      The aim of the test was to verify/dispel Microsoft's claims that browsing on Edge will make your battery last longer. Edge doesn't have an Android version, and the market share of Windows Phones is too small to be relevant.

      • Again - who cares? Most Windows users don't even run Edge - they pretty much automatically install Chrome. And even the remnants who do run Edge because it's just there aren't exactly going to learn how to install/use a new browser because some test said one was a little faster.

        (Honestly, the next browser challenge is just to get everyone to run ad/malware-script blockers.)

    • Sob... I and the other 2 users of Firefox OS will tell you Mozilla was ahead of the curve but sadly killed the platform.

  • Can someone just post a table of the results they got. Not watching a stupid video for information I could absorb in 15 seconds from text.

  • Since we are stuck using it for many of our systems, it would be helpful to know how it rates.

  • Irrelevant (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Aethedor ( 973725 ) on Monday June 26, 2017 @10:23AM (#54691465)
    It's a web browser. It gives me access to the world wide web. Security and privacy are far, far more important than battery life. Chrome is made by Google, which is an absolute no-go when it comes to privacy. So, thanks, but no Chrome for me.

    • Re:Irrelevant (Score:4, Interesting)

      by oakgrove ( 845019 ) on Monday June 26, 2017 @11:12AM (#54691917)

      You don't think MS' telemetry and browser is gathering information on you at 10 times the rate of Google Chrome? If you cared that much, you'd be using an OS that doesn't support Edge in the first place.

      • Who says I'm using a Microsoft OS while browsing the internet?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      At least you have choices...
      Chromium is open source, and de-googled versions are available. And there's always firefox.
      Apple also don't seem to be so interested in collecting user data as MS and google, and there's also opera.

  • Configuration (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    A family member's machine was "running slow" so I setup Firefox and configured it not to use disk cache at all.
    She has broadband internet and does not go near her monthly limit and frankly I think the network request can serve the content up faster than the laptop hard drive.
    Google Chrome and other browsers lack the feature to really minimize disk writes by eliminating disk cache.
    RAM is cheap and she generally just puts the thing in standby, meaning sites are still cached in RAM if their cache metadata hasn

  • just a feeling (Score:3)

    by epine ( 68316 ) on Monday June 26, 2017 @11:24AM (#54692023)

    Just a feeling, but I suspect HTML 2.0 would have lapped the field, and then gone out for an late-night pub crawl, returning home at the cock of dawn to romp nekid until the sun crosses over the yard arm with an insatiable beer-goggles Wonder Bra, and still find enough energy in the tank to chew off his arm a few hours later.

  • The upshot is, Microsoft, once again, has been caught lying. Which is, of course, not news. Consider yourself middle-fingered, Microsoft.

  • What Version of FireFox was used? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The real question that we should be asking is what version of FireFox did he use? v54 just debuted with better RAM management, wouldn't that directly translate to improved battery life?

    • The amount of data stored in RAM doesn't impact power consumption.
      If Firefox is spending more CPU time to better manage RAM usage, it may equate to worse battery life.

  • It's good news (Score:4, Funny)

    by viperidaenz ( 2515578 ) on Monday June 26, 2017 @04:12PM (#54694381)

    Windows has recently stopped reminding me that switching to Edge will gain me 2 hours battery life, despite my laptop being plugged in 95% of the time.
    They're now telling me constantly that I need to adjust my screen brightness settings to save my battery, despite being plugged in to an external monitor with no backlight adjustment capability and hence no control to change it in the settings this "helpful" tip takes me to.

    Go Windows 10!

  • Does anyone know if Opera was used in battery saver mode?

  • Duck battery, I need a browser who actually works, and Chrome is NOT one that work with all types of websites. Frequently I have to launch Firefox for that and always keep it installed when using Chrome. That's why, up to today, I never totally migrated into Chrome. I still use Chrome when youtubing because of the extensions, and that is the only reason. At work I never use Chrome.

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