The browser wars have cooled considerably in recent months, but Microsoft still has plenty of ammunition left and once again comes out to defend its Edge browser. The favorite point of attack in Redmond is battery performance, and with the Creators Update installed, Windows 10 users can get more than three additional hours compared with Google Chrome, while the gap against Firefox is five and a half hours.
April 11 is now behind us, and a good portion of Windows 10 users should have received the Creators Update unless they chose an early manual update. One of the things Microsoft wants to revitalize with this upgrade is its Edge browser, which remains stuck below five percent market share. Personally I'll admit it works fine, but there are other details working against it. Extension support arrived much later than expected, its dependence on the Windows Store keeps many users away, and it unfortunately has to carry the inheritance of Internet Explorer, which still leads it by five points. What is Microsoft's strategy? The keyword is battery.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/2wOz9MuwERsThe benchmark
According to the fine print of this benchmark, Microsoft took three Surface Book laptops with Windows 10 Creators Update, installed Chrome 57 alongside Firefox 52, and deactivated several elements to maximize battery life on all systems, including sound, GPS, Bluetooth, and the ambient light sensor. Screen brightness was set to 75 percent, updates were temporarily blocked, and notifications were silenced with Quiet Hours. The video (38 minutes, published on Vimeo) was set to loop and kept playing until all three laptops gave up.
Firefox lasted 7 hours, 4 minutes, and 19 seconds. Google Chrome went a bit further with 9 hours, 17 minutes, and 3 seconds. Unsurprisingly, the winner was Microsoft Edge, with 12 hours, 31 minutes, and 8 seconds.
Why we need independent tests
Microsoft's numbers suggest Edge consumes 31 percent less energy than Chrome and 44 percent less than Firefox, particularly at the CPU and GPU level. That sounds good, but we must insist on independent testing. Microsoft controls the software, the hardware, the environment, and the secondary parameters. Using Vimeo also implies a potential difference in codecs and acceleration. We hope someone can reproduce the benchmark under different conditions to see whether Edge's advantage holds.
