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Microsoft Says Edge is Still More Power Efficient than Chrome and Firefox (neowin.net) 90

Posted by EditorDavid from the browser-battles dept.
An anonymous reader quotes Neowin: Every time Microsoft releases a Windows 10 feature update, it runs some efficiency tests to prove that its Edge browser is significantly faster than the competition, which includes Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. Then the company posts the detailed results on its Windows blog and YouTube channel, boasting about the power efficiency of its browser. Even though the company still has run battery tests, it has remained strangely silent about them, posting about it on GitHub only. While many thought that Microsoft's silence on the matter was due to Edge finally losing to the competition, it appears that this is not the case.

As spotted by Paul Thurrott, Microsoft has indeed run efficiency tests for Edge in Windows 10 version 1809, pitting it against the likes of Firefox and Chrome. Through these tests, the company has concluded that Edge lasts 24% longer than Chrome and a massive 94% longer than Firefox on average.
"While Edge appears to have won these efficiency tests easily as well, it is likely that the company did not decide to promote this achievement -- as it has always done previously -- because of the planned abandonment of EdgeHTML in favor of Chromium," the article concludes.

"It will be very interesting to see if Microsoft Edge is able to maintain its battery advantage once the switch to Chromium is complete."
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Microsoft Says Edge is Still More Power Efficient than Chrome and Firefox More

Microsoft Says Edge is Still More Power Efficient than Chrome and Firefox

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  • If only... (Score:4, Funny)

    by bblb ( 5508872 ) on Sunday December 30, 2018 @12:40AM (#57878138)
    If only it worked as well in the real world as it apparently does in tests.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jwhyche ( 6192 )

      Wouldn't this be the truth. I like the concept of Edge. A small little browser with out all the crud. Unfortunately, there are still to many little annoying bugs.

      • A small little browser with out all the crud.

        Yeah, I don't like CSS, either. Oh, wait!

      • Re:If only... (Score:4, Funny)

        by Leslie43 ( 1592315 ) on Sunday December 30, 2018 @01:17AM (#57878218)

        Unfortunately, there are still to many little annoying bugs.

        Windows 10 is not a bug, it's a feature!

      • Of course it's more power efficient, it's a zombie, they require no energy at all to keep moving.

    • Re:If only... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by KiloByte ( 825081 ) on Sunday December 30, 2018 @08:11AM (#57878902)

      Yeah. They bash Firefox as "slow" while it's the only browser among these three that can discard a meaningful part of ads and tracking. _All_ people I care about see no ads (either by being tech-minded on their own, or by having someone set it up for them), so a realistic test should have no ads and trackers included.

      And those cause more than 90% of slowness.

      Right now (family home), I'm sitting on a 32-bit Pentium4 with an ancient monitor, while the good monitor and 4294967296 SoCs sit unused (long story...), and Firefox works pretty adequately. Also got a super-restricted new laptop (Thinkpad T480) with me -- Chrome on it is _slower_ than Firefox on the P4.

    • Re:If only... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Deathlizard ( 115856 ) on Sunday December 30, 2018 @01:26PM (#57879850) Homepage Journal

      To be fair I haven't run into game ending flaws in rendering using Edge recently, but that not the reason I don't use it. The main reason why I use Firefox (and Chrome) over Edge is it's user interface. Edge's interface is broken, idiot designed and needs to die in a fire.

      For example. I use a lot of bookmarks. The way I use them is I add the bookmarks toolbar, create a folder (IE: news, weather, games, etc) and then bookmark each site in the respected folder and sort them top to bottom from most to least used. Chrome, Firefox, even IE does this correctly while Edge still struggles to do this right. At first you couldn't even put a folder in the bar, then you could but couldn't sort them. Then you could sort then but the sync would sort them backwards, or worse duplicate them. Then sync stopped working altogether. then it would cut off long names, ETC

      On top of all that, they even got clicking on the folders wrong. In Chrome and Firefox, you click on a folder, the folder opens, and then you can just highlight other folders to see their contents. in Edge (and IE) you click on a folder and then have to double click the next folder (one click to close the one you were in. Another click to open the one you're currently on) to open it, which slows you down and is infuriating. This simple UI adjustment would make Edge almost on par with it's peers in usability and ease of use.

      This is just one of many stupid decisions they made to the user interface. I haven't even started on History management, extension issues and other UI things. To be fair some of them have been fixed over time (like importing and exporting bookmarks from other browsers since you'll be doing that a lot because sync is broken and using extensions with inprivate browsing) but there's still a lot to be desired.

      Simply put, If they would fix the interface issues instead of focusing on idiotic useless features like "I CAN DRAW ON THE SCREEN!!" they might have been a little more competitive.

  • Strange... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by beheaderaswp ( 549877 ) *

    After all these years I have a hard time understanding why "browser wars" are still a thing.

    We've got plenty of options and more perhaps coming.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Anrego ( 830717 )

      Right.
      I mean people having strong preferences is fair. The web browser gets a lot of use, and minor things can make a big difference in experience.
      But who cares what everyone else is using. We're (at least mostly) past the point where it really matters. As long as no one gets enough market share where they can just start making shit up again like in the good ol' ie6 days, it shouldn't matter.

    • There have been three major options... IE/Edge (they are just different versions of the same engine, and I have personally seen them share bugs), Chrome, and Firefox. With Edge gone that may downgrade the engine to rarely used (since IE and any IE/Edge reskins can still use it), leaving us with just Chrome and Firefox. Easier for web developers as well as malware developers: a double-edged sword.

    • Re:Strange... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ArhcAngel ( 247594 ) on Sunday December 30, 2018 @02:05AM (#57878338)
      You're looking at the war from the wrong direction. History showed us what happens when a strong player in the market decides to implement special features without a standards bodies blessing. Web sites start using the feature making all other browsers behave badly on their site. Which drives users to the browser that works on the site. There are companies literally still using IE 6 because their mission critical intranet application will not work on any other browser. Fast forward to today. Google is the dominant player and Chrome is full of new features that have not been submitted to a W3C or any other standards group. Google is hoping to further edge out (pun intended) the competition. The war is for market share and there are real dollars on the line.
    • Said the one guy in the thread who doesn't know what Chromium is.

    • No, one less coming. Browser development is way out of the realm of open source hackers. CSS and JavaScript are complicated, and that's ignoring optimization. Mozilla has fought this for years, and they were funded by Google all that time (clown shoes). Big money is where it's at now.

      • Browser development is way out of the realm of open source hackers.

        That is very amusing, considering that Blink, the rendering engine in Chromium, is descended from Webkit, which is descended from KHTML, which is the rendering engine created by Open Source hackers for KDE's Konqueror Web browser.

        Blink is Open Source, so a skilled Open Source hacker could have a working Web browser running in a weekend if he really wanted to. Its rendering accuracy would rival Chrome and Firefox right out of the gate, so said hacker's job would be the usability of the Web browser rather th

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      The ability to still control a browser, OS and block all ads and tracking.
      Thats what's its an OS and browser apart from "renting" as OS for "free" as a user.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by markdavis ( 642305 )

      >"After all these years I have a hard time understanding why "browser wars" are still a thing. We've got plenty of options and more perhaps coming."

      No we don't. We had four major browsers: IE, Firefox, Chrome/Chromium, and Safari. Everything else is now barely noise on a graph. Of those 4, only TWO are multiplatform (Firefox, Chrome) and open source (Firefox, Chromium). And only one (Firefox) is open development, browser-only company, open-source, and multiplatform.

      Google's hard-core Chrome marketin

  • Who Cares? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by angel'o'sphere ( 80593 ) <angelo.schneider ... e ['oom' in gap]> on Sunday December 30, 2018 @01:16AM (#57878212) Journal

    A browser that is so dysfunctional that no one uses it, who cares how efficient or fast it is?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      One interesting thing to note from the testing methodology though:

      Windows Update was temporarily disabled

      Okay Microsoft, I need to verify your results. How do I disable Windows Update completely?

  • Your browser can't use much battery power on laptops...

    ...if no one ever uses it.

  • why is microsoft building a new edge browser using chromium?

  • Is it really more power efficient? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Sunday December 30, 2018 @02:17AM (#57878364)
    Most of the time I run CCleaner on my laptop, I get a message saying it needs to close Edge to clean its cache files. I don't use Edge. So apparently Microsoft has gamed it so Edge runs in the backround even if you don't use it.

    That makes me wonder about the tests where Edge "beats" other browsers in power consumption. Maybe they were actually measuring the power consumption of Chrome + Edge, vs only Edge.
    • You're right about Edge running in the background, after the last update and going through settings I was surprised to see Edge turned on. I know I had it off plus I never use it, why does it need to be running?

      • Re: Is it really more power efficient? (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Don't be surprised: Microsoft resets all your settings (and removes manually installed drivers) on every feature update.

      • Define "running". Look to the right of Edge, see that little green leaf? Then google how Windows 10 suspends processes and how superfetch preloads them.

        The only benefit here is that edge executes faster. It doesn't "run" in the background. In fact a suspended process requires external triggers to wake and can't even wake itself.

    • I would guess Edge is used in a set of UWP apps and Windows UI elements. That is probably why you those results. As these will be the same for both tests, it shouldn't matter for the results (unless memory consumption is measured).

    • Re:Is it really more power efficient? (Score:4, Informative)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday December 30, 2018 @03:46AM (#57878514)

      You're reading too much into it. On Windows 10 UWPs like Edge, the store, Pictures etc don't ever get closed but rather they get suspended. They sit in RAM but are otherwise blocked from executing any task until some external event (e.g. user running the executable) rewakes the process. If the system runs low on memory the suspended processes get dumped.

      This has the effect of only helping initial startup times. These suspended apps don't consume any CPU or power. They only reason they exist at all is because part of superfetch is that it pre-executes these apps so they are ready to go when you need them. Though I wish it wouldn't do it for those apps which are unused.

  • yet they want to switch to Chromium engine.

  • It all comes down to... (Score:3)

    by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Sunday December 30, 2018 @06:22AM (#57878732)
    shared library shenanigans that boost Edge performance.
    They will switch to Chromium, remove the shenanigans and we're back to zero.
  • Why does Microsoft always double down on the shitty products it makes instead of admit failure, learn a lesson, and move on? Edge is shitty! It has a crappy UI and overall feel. I am NOT going to use it and there is no convincing me otherwise: I don't even like Chrome. I am a Firefox user. I don't even care if Firefox is marginally less resource efficient if it has a good UI and smooth experience.

  • I bought my girlfriend a Dell laptop for Christmas. She’s a MS SQL DBA primarily and specifically said no MacBook (I’m a Unix Eng and have a MacBook :) ).

    Anyway, not long after getting her laptop up and configured, we removed MacAfee, it would popup every few minutes insisting she purchase the product, and then after hunting for a few things on the ‘net and having trouble with Edge’s results, asked me which browser I recommended. I had her install chrome even though I use Firefox (I

  • is that they are probably going to lose the power efficiency advantage once they switch to chrome's engine.

    i like the idea of having a barebones light browser that just renders good webpages. kinda like the original phoenix was supposed to do

  • Thanks to Ubuntu, I have been free of the influences of microsoft since July 4th of this year. There is no condition or event that could make me reconsider that decision, so I couldn't possibly care about their browser or o.s. or apps or whatever.
  • Last May Microsoft hired a bunch of Volkswagen diesel emission control software developers to work on the Edge browser. So it was just a matter of time before it nailed the benchmarks.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Microsoft tweaks Windows to make Chrome look bad? (Score:3)

    by najajomo ( 4890785 ) on Sunday December 30, 2018 @06:56PM (#57881588)
    “Edge lasts 24% longer than Chrome and a massive 94% longer than Firefox on average”

    Assuming this to be true, that would mean that Edge renders pages more efficiently that the others. If so, the most plausible reason for this would be that Edge is using different API calls than the rest. If so that would mean Microsoft is cheating on this test. It wouldn't be the first time softwares premier software innovator has done so. There even was a name for this back in the day, Microsoft Undocumentation [sonic.net].

  • ...but you're not going to haul sheets of plywood, or kids to a party, or anyone over 50 in the back seat, for that matter.

    Sure, build a browser with less power, and you'll get more efficiency. Good luck with all the broken sites you'll encounter!

  • I use four browsers.
    I usually open Firefox as my first choice, but I end up using it about equal with Chrome, and together that is more than 95% of my usage.
    I infrequently, but sometimes, open Edge primarily. However, I allow Edge to remain as the OS default browser, so when I click on a link in an email or some other extra-browser origin, it opens in Edge. Thus, I use Edge with some regularity, but only for brief take-a-looks, and if I intend to play around at that website or save pages, I copy the url a

  • I haven't brought up Edge at all ever. I won't willingly use a Microsoft browser again, except briefly to download an alternative browser. (and Windows 10 still for some odd reason has Internet Explorer, which I keep hearing is obsolete.) Microsoft has proven to my satisfaction in past years that they have no intention of creating a browser that adheres to industry standards, except by the market-speak that "we're Microsoft, whatever we decide to do is an industry standard".

    Fastest browser? I don't care

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