Microsoft Edge Once Again Surpasses Chrome & Firefox In Battery Efficiency

Every once in a while, Microsoft puts its proprietary browser – Internet Edge to some battery efficiency test and boasts the results on Youtube and its own blog like it did last year.

However, this time was different. Although Edge did extremely well when tied against Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, the company was surprisingly quiet about the results. It might as well be because of the Edge’s shift over the Chromium project.

Anyway, Microsoft concluded from the test that Edge lasts 24% longer than Chrome and 94% longer than Firefox, on an average. It is important to note that all the Surface devices on which tests were conducted were running the latest Windows 10 October Update (version 1809).

As for the test methodology — “The Microsoft Edge team measured the time it took identical Surface Book laptops to run fully through their batteries while streaming HTML5 video in fullscreen.” writes Microsoft on GitHub.

The Surface devices played the video until each of them lost their battery power. Following that, the team used Maxim power driver and “powercfg /spr” to collect the power consumption data. Apart from this, few other settings were tweaked on all the Surface devices in order to get “a realistic user setup”. The test conditions were as follows –

Display brightness was set to 50%
Volume was set to mute
Location was disabled
Bluetooth was disabled
Quiet hours were enabled
Updates were temporarily disabled
The device was connected to a wireless network
Ambient light sensor was disabled
Defender was running normally and up to date
The device was physically unplugged and running on battery
Windows Battery Saver mode was set to activate at 20% battery
Windows Update was temporarily disabled
The cache was cleared on each browser

Interestingly, Microsoft Edge managed to run for over 16 hours while Google Chrome lasted almost for 13 hours. As for Mozilla Firefox, it stayed only for 8 hours.