Microsoft Edge Browser
Microsoft has been trying their darndest to make their edge browser happen. An uphill battle given Internet Explorer’s reputation among consumers and I would say that alongside the strategically-placed and I am going to say this snarky prompts that Windows 10 is always dishing out for you to make edge your default browser. The juiciest peach that Microsoft has to entice users to jump ship is their claim, that edge offers better battery life than any other browser.
But does it? In this article of manufacturers say, we explore the current state of browser battery life and determine, if Microsoft’s claims constitute an epic mic drop or an epic ball drop.
I buy power and MSI’s new lineup of gaming laptops featured until seventh generation core i7 processors. We used four brand-new identical inspiring 157559s loaned to us by Dell. Thanks Dell! so from the moment these landed in our office careful attention was paid to keep them as similar to one another as possible.
If steam was installed in one machine it had to be installed on the other three as well. So one thing we needed to know was with manufacturing tolerances in mind, just how identical are these machines? If we had a lemon, We needed to know about it. We ran PC markets home conventional battery test on each laptop twice and although there is some variability in the test results. We consider all of them to be within the margin of error that we have come to expect from PC mark and no machine was consistently better or worse than any of the others across the two tests.
Control Testing Conditions
Next we had to control our testing conditions. If one of the machines decides to update its bloat ware value added pre-installed software. Thanks Dell, halfway through an overnight run that is just too much pee in the punchbowl for that machine’s results to be meaningful. We uninstalled everything with Dell in the name iced McAfee blacked out GeForce experience. Locked down windows privacy and politely asked Cortana to reenact her death scene at the end of Halo 4.
Then having run out of puns we disabled telemetry set the brightness to 50% and set the system volume to 15%. With our machines sufficiently sanitized, we were ready to move on from synthetic tests to real-life loads starting with edge running on all four machines, once again to ensure consistency.
We designed our real-world tests to reflect actual internet browsing. Some social a dash of news, a sprinkle of auto save and a 6-hour stream of the 4k Yule Log. Pretty typical stuff for this time of year and wait what on the very first test we had machines dying up to an hour and a half earlier than the others. Even though they’re all the same laptop running in identical environments with the same browser so we did the same test two more times and got similar results. What gives in order to find out if the inconsistencies were due to the browser or due to the machines, we would end up needing a lot more tests.
Testing Results of Opera,Firefox and Chrome
We downloaded Chrome, Firefox and opera on each machine and ran tests after tests. Rotating the browsers across the machines and as for the results, well there do seem to be some differences between units 1 to 4 with machine 3 toeing the border of dud territory. But that is far from the whole story when we ran Chrome or opera on all four machines they died within 20 minutes of each other.
And if we compare the best and worst times of individual browsers across multiple tests on the same machine, we see that edge just has the biggest range between its lap times. Hold on Linus Microsoft never claimed to have the most consistent battery life.
They claimed to have the best battery life. It’s a tortoise and a hard thing well no you hold on because we’ are just getting started not only did edge not trounce the competition in our tests. It didn’t even get the high score chrome did. Well hold on again Linus because edge just got a huge battery life boost with the recent Windows creators update and you didn’t even use the same testing methodology that Microsoft did when they made these claims to begin with.
You know what you hold on even harder, because this project took freaking forever and we actually did tests before and after. The creator’s update and although edge performed very well and not to mention much more consistently after the update, it still didn’t break our longest life record. Besides since Microsoft’s testing methodology is public well Rick recreated that one too and Ed’s still got beat.
Got to calm down here, its conclusion time so prior to the creator’s update, Edge had big winners and big losers but since then, it’s closer to the consistently good performance that we observed from chrome.
Opera is also a good choice and it even has a battery saver mode but well did not improve our life in our tests but did improve consistency and as for Firefox.
Well it’s probably not your best bet if battery life is your number one priority.
Bottom line at the time of writing Edge no longer has well an edge. When it comes to battery life but Microsoft certainly deserves props for stimulating healthy competition that benefits us all except that is safari people.
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