Windows 10 Edge Browser can save battery life

Microsoft has been in the operating system game for decades, but now it's making a move in the web browser wars. 

Microsoft Edge, the first new browser interface and engine of this decade, comes with every shipping copy of Windows10. Microsoft says it has "tens of millions of users," but it's barely a blip on most web browser market share reports. 

Even so, Microsoft has used the telemetry provided by those millions of users and an exhaustive battery of tests to prove that Microsoft Edge is actually a more battery-efficient browser than Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera. 

Microsoft engineers outline how the current Edge browser can save up to 53 percent of your battery life on a Windows 10 system, as compared to other web browsers like Chrome and Firefox. Apparently the next Edge browser, which will ship with the upcoming Windows 10 Anniversary Update, will be even more energy efficient.

Jason Weber, Microsoft's director of program management for Microsoft Edge, explained that different web browsers consume energy in very different ways, much like cars don't all consume gas in the same way. Some are more efficient than others. Some run like they're always in the city while others operate in a more efficient highway miles mode.

Weber contends that Chrome is a city driver. "When you’re browsing the web with Chrome, like city miles, it wakes up, sprints to next stop light, stops and then sprints to next stop light. It's one way to get through city, but uses a lot of gas," he said. 

According to Weber, Chrome and Firefox are constantly talking to the operating system. He described it as waking up roughly 60 times a second (and sometimes up to 250 times a second).

Edge takes advantage of its deeper integration with the operating system to wake less frequently, he claimed. 

For example, when you touch the screen of your Windows 10 touchscreen computer, the hardware wakes up, sends a message to the web browser on screen. If it's Chrome, Chrome then tells Windows 10 it needs to animate the screen to scroll up or down. With Edge, you can scroll the web page without waking it up. The OS is already there, ready to do the graphical work.

Having hours of more battery life on your laptop because you chose Edge over Chrome sounds amazing. But why should we trust these claims? Testing technology battery life is notoriously difficult. You have to have multiple test beds, nothing extraneous running in the background that could impact battery consumption and perfectly repeatable test scripts. Compounding this is the challenge of testing web page battery consumption. Every page is different and most of what consumes power happens in the background.

Weber acknowledged the challenge, but said Microsoft had figured out a few ways to accurately test Web browser battery consumption. The team combined lab tests, telemetry from millions of Edge users, and a run-down test that it captured on video.

Watch the video here to learn more!

The video showed particularly impressive power gains. At one point, the system running Microsoft Edge ran 70 percent longer than the one running Google Chrome.

Whether or not you believe Microsoft, the company is already busy ramping up power efficiency for the next, big Microsoft Edge release, which will arrive as part of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update later this year.

The Anniversary Update will make Flash a separate process and the system will pause any unnecessary Flash operations. It will also stop Flash if it becomes unstable, without impacting the rest of the browser session.

No doubt Google will have something to say about all this!

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