Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Microsoft publishes another test highlighting the Edge browser's power efficiency

Mark Coppock
By

Edge laptop
Image used with permission by copyright holder
The Windows 10 Creators Update that was just released brings a number of new features and improvements to the operating system. It’s not just the OS, however, that Microsoft spent some time improving, but also some of the first-party apps that go along with it — with the Edge browser being a highlight.

While Edge received its own helping of new features, it appears that Microsoft also spent considerable time improving its underlying performance. The company has been touting Edge’s advantage in power efficiency for a while now, and it published some additional results to back up its claim that Edge can help you work longer without a charge.

Microsoft Edge Experiment: Battery Life | Windows 10 Creators Update Edition

Specifically, Microsoft took a look at browser efficiency when running fullscreen Vimeo video following the installation of Creators Update. Tests were run on three Surface Books running Windows 10 build 15063, measuring how long it took for them to completely run down the battery when running a Vimeo streaming video in Edge, Chrome 57, and Firefox 52.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Although the results are necessarily limited by the scope of the testing, they’re still impressive. The Surface Book running Edge lasted 751 minutes before running out of steam, while the machines running Chrome and Firefox lasted for 557 and 424 minutes, respectively. That means that Edge held out for 77 percent longer than Firefox and 35 percent longer than Chrome.

Recommended Videos

The Surface Books used in the tests were equipped with Intel Core i5-6300 CPUs and 8GB of RAM, and were running with the Intel HD Graphics 520 GPU. The machines were on the same wireless network with display brightness set at 75 percent and a number of options disabled. The tests therefore not only highlight the efficiency of Microsoft’s Edge browser, but they also provide a hint as to how to optimize a Surface Book for the best battery life.

Related

In the end, we’d expect a test that Microsoft publishes to favor its own Edge browser. But these results are nothing new — Edge has clearly been engineered to save some battery life over competitive browsers. Going forward, we’ll need to see if Edge can maintain its advantage as more power-sucking extensions are implemented and more people start using Edge on different machines.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Mark Coppock
Mark Coppock
Computing Writer
Mark has been a geek since MS-DOS gave way to Windows and the PalmPilot was a thing. He’s translated his love for…
Is Microsoft’s new PC cleaner just an Edge ad in disguise?
The new PC Manager app on a Windows 11 desktop

Microsoft really wants you to use the Edge browser, so much so that the company has tied it to PC optimization in a new settings app. Microsoft PC Manager does what you could always do by opening the settings menu, but the new app also prompts you to set Edge as your default browser.

Screenshots of the new app were posted on Twitter by @ALumia_Italia and appears to show what is a public beta of the app. The app performs basic maintenance functions. You can check startup apps, check for updates, run disk cleanup, and other minor optimizations.

Read more
Microsoft Edge has a new trick for increased performance
Edge Browser

The Microsoft Edge browser is now even more optimized and has a bit higher performance on Windows. That's thanks to changes in version 102 of the browser, which can now automatically compress disk caches.

Microsoft talked about this in a technical post, explaining that its overall goal is to "deliver the best performing browser possible on Windows and other platforms." In what seems like a shot at Google Chrome, Microsoft also mentioned that they're aware that when a web browser consumed too many resources, the system can be slowed down. That's where disk caching comes into play.

Read more
Microsoft Edge gets hit with the same serious security bug that plagued Chrome
The Microsoft Edge browser is open on a Surface Book 2 in tablet mode.

Microsoft just released an Edge browser update that patches a dangerous flaw that could allow a cleverly designed attack to execute arbitrary code. While every security update should be installed promptly, this one is a bit more urgent because the attack is "in the wild" already, meaning that hackers are already taking advantage of this vulnerability to breach security.

Designated CVE-2022-2294, this vulnerability was actually a flaw with the Chromium project, the open-source code that Google's Chrome browser is built upon. Microsoft uses the same base code for the Edge browser, meaning bugs that affect one often plague the other. Google patched the same bug recently and has been keeping quiet about details of the attack to allow others to make similar fixes, since Chromium is quite a popular codebase.

Read more