But while Microsoft is like a dog with a bone, unwilling to let the battery issue lie, it ignores one very important factor: people are looking for much, much more from their web browser than just decent battery life.
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THE DANCE-OFF over which browser has the best battery life goes on in a war that has turned some parts of the internet into an uninhabitable zone in the hours of darkness. In the report that the tech giant released with regards to the test that it conducted, the web browsers were put through their paces using the same devices and streaming the same online content. It seems that Edge is better when it comes to browsing too.
In video tests, Microsoft showed that Edge provided 527 minutes of playback, Opera gave 429, Chrome lasted 365 minutes, and Firefox brought up the rear with just 312 minutes.
Microsoft rolled out a series of tests earlier this year to demonstrate that its brand-new Edge browser is more energy-efficient and faster than rivals Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera, and the company is now conducting the same benchmark once again after a recent update that Google made to its own browser.
However, closer inspection reveals that Microsoft used Chrome 51 (not 53), Opera 38 (not 39) and Firefox 36 (not 38).
But not fast enough, which is why Microsoft had to “intelligently” use test results to make it seem like Edge is a competitive browser.
The company even open-sourced its battery test on GitHub and released its full methodology so that others can duplicate and verify their results. Aside from the purported superiority of Microsoft’s web browser against its competitors, it’s also possible that the Windows 10 Anniversary Update could have played a role in giving “Edge” that extra boost in efficiency. Thus, Edge performed 45 performed longer than Chrome and 23 percent longer than Opera.
Google had a similar reaction and pointed to the battery improvements in Chrome 53, which it says cuts down on battery drain substantially when compared to Chrome 46, which launched in 2015.
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“The Microsoft Windows team measured the time it took four identical Surface Book laptops to run fully through their batteries while streaming video from Netflix”, the report reads.
