Do You Want Battery Power Efficiency? Microsoft Says You Should Use Edge And Not Chrome Or Firefox

It is widely reported that just about a quarter of Windows 10 users actually use Microsoft’s new browser; Edge and this comes as other browsers have stepped up campaign to increase the use of their browsers on Windows. Yielding to users who complain about adverts, Opera announced an ad-blocking feature in order to make web pages load faster. At least that’s the reason they gave for doing that.  

To increase usage for its new browser, Microsoft released a set of results of tests it carried out which actually shows that Edge is better than other browsers including Chrome and Firefox. This test was carried out by the Microsoft team and in their own controlled environment.

Let’s get to the test results;

You can now browse longer with Microsoft Bing than any of the other major browser. This means Edge is more power efficient than Chrome, Firefox and Opera. They achieved this by connecting a Surface Book to specialized power monitoring equipment and measured the actual power usage during typical browsing activities in Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.

The next step was to automate each browser to perform the same series of activities: opening websites, scrolling through articles, and watching videos, opening new tabs for each task. We used the same websites you spend your time on – Facebook, Google, YouTube, Amazon, Wikipedia and more.

The result is what you see in the graph below;

Edge performed better than Firefox and Chrome up to 70 percent with respect to battery life each time you stream videos and with when you access sites like Facebook, you might be saving between 30 to 35 percent of power. This announcement comes as Microsoft is about a month away from celebrating the one year anniversary of the Windows 10 release.

It’s one thing though to save battery life which also undoubtedly has impact on your overall productivity but speed is just as important. My personal experience using Edge is that it doesn’t load pages as fast as Chrome and Firefox. There are even reports of some sites not loading correctly on Edge. There’s also the issue of memory consumption as well.  I also noticed that it’s quite slower to copy and paste content from Edge to say word when compared to Chrome and Firefox.

Opera introduced its advert blocking feature for the sake of speed; a measure that has been met with stiff resistance from big names like the New York Times which is rolling out its own feature to not probably load its content on such browsers. The New York Times is not alone in that as many other sites have pledged to do the same.

In its own test result which can be seen above, web pages will load 90 percent faster than Internet Explorer and 45 percent faster than Chrome.

Paul Balo contributed to this report