Microsoft's been trying their darnest 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'm 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 episode 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 by Power and MSI's new lineup of gaming laptops feature Intel 7th
generation Core i7 processors. Check them out at the link
below. For our test, we used four brand
new identical Inspiron
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. So, we ran PC Mark8's 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've come to expect from PC Mark. And no
machine was consistently better or worse
than any of the others across the two tests. Next, we had to control our
testing conditions. If one of the machines decides to update its
bloatware value added pre-installed
software, thanks Dell, halfway through
an overnight run. That's just too much pee in the punch bowl for that machine's
results to be meaningful. So, 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 reall life loads.
Starting with Edge running on all four
machines once again to ensure
consistency. So, we designed our real world test to reflect actual internet
browsing. Some social, a dash of news, a
sprinkle of autosave, and a 6-hour stream of the 4K UL 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. So, we
downloaded Chrome, Firefox, and Opera on
each machine and ran test after test,
rotating the browsers across the machines. And as for the results, well,
there do seem to be some differences between units one to four with machine 3
towing the border of dud territory, but that's 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. But
hold on, Lionus. Microsoft never claimed to have the most consistent battery
life. They claimed to have the best battery life. It's a tortoise in a hair
thing. Well, no. You hold on because we're 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,
Lidus, because Edge just got a huge
battery life boost with the recent Windows Creators Update. And you guys
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 creators 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. And besides,
since Microsoft's testing methodology is public, well, we recreated that one,
too. and Edge still got
beat. Gotta calm down here. It's conclusion time. So, prior to the
creators 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 that well didn't 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. So, 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
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