Microsoft shows how bad Chrome is for your laptop's battery | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft shows how bad Chrome is for your laptop's battery

theverge.com

29 pointsdoener20 comments

Two thoughts: Now that Chrome has virtually all of Ecmascript 6 compliancall save for tail-call optimization) and a good smattering of Ecmascript 7 in (just realized last week) it would seem that the next step for the V8/Chromium teams would be to optimize the hell out of the stack "it's far easier to make a correct program fast than it is to make a fast program correct"

The second is that while Edge is only on a single platform that Microsoft owns, Chrome is on multiple platforms. Thus one would hope that they can optimize their own stack for this one particular test. Perhaps this is a copout, but still worthy of mentioning

The other factor is that Edge implements far less of ECMA specs than Chrome. It would be interesting to see how much more CPU power would be used by Edge when it implements the same set of functionality as Chrome's V8 engine.

I use a Surface Pro 4, an incredibly buggy device that has the most to gain from switching to Edge. The battery life with Chrome is about 3 hours. Unfortunately, Edge still only supports extensions (i.e. adblocking) in preview releases as far as I'm aware.

A browser without adblocking in 2016 is worthless. Looking forward to the July update and hopefully a ublock origin port sometime before the end of the year.

Just to add to this, I'd be curious to see a head-to-head of the various browsers with an appropriate adblock extension active as well.

Google products seem to often be terrible for your battery. Even on firefox, having google docs or gmail or whatever open sets of that damned google talk plugin that devours my battery. So much of android too, from what I remember. Seems like they make awesome products, but without any regard for efficiency.

Okay, now run one running Edge under Windows 10 versus the same laptop running Chrome OS.

Since Chrome itself kills battery life, what makes you think an OS where all user applications are Chrome-based is gonna help?

Is there a windows notebook that runs for 12+ hours on battery? I have yet to find one. Seems like Windows notebook makers are scrimping on the battery.

My rather old Samsung ChromeBook runs all day on a single charge. So I don't think that the problem is Chrome. More likely that Microsoft knows kernel internals that help it run more efficiently than third parties who don't have such inside knowledge.

>My rather old Samsung ChromeBook runs all day on a single charge. So I don't think that the problem is Chrome. More likely that Microsoft knows kernel internals that help it run more efficiently than third parties who don't have such inside knowledge

Conspiracy theory that doesn't explain how every non-MS other browser beats Chrome on the same game, including Firefox. And it's not like Chrome/Chromium on Linux is battery-friendly either.

The actual difference (why Chromebook can get 12 hours battery life) is that Windows (or OS X for that matter) runs much more stuff compared to ChromeOS under the hood. Now consider the times a Chromebook with an actually efficient browser would get.

Opera: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11961649

I would be interested to see the power consumption impact of browsing the Verge

Seems like a lot of people are criticizing the validity of this test.

And yet, this is an easy test to replicate:

1. Charge any windows 10 laptop to 100%.

2. Set alarm to go off at 80% Battery.

3. Stream video (netflix, amazon, youtube, etc..)

4. repeat with next browser.

Maybe they should do a comparison of extension support or developer tools? :P

It's funny how Microsoft conducted the "tests" on Chrome [1] & Firefox [2] and discreetly leave out Safari. Safari is by far a winner when it comes to efficiency. So hats off to MS for their "informative" & "thorough" test(s).

[1] has been known for draining battery, so no surprises there.

[2] which for a couple of releases has become even more unusable. On my MBP (2014, i5, 8GB), takes over 4+ seconds for the bar to activate. Hopefully with the introduction of E10S [3], next releases will be much more perfomant.

[3] https://wiki.mozilla.org/E10s

EDIT: I did not know Safari is no more on Windows. So in that case Edge is the winner for Windows.

Co-signed. I had no idea how efficient Safari was.

Safari doesn't run on Windows (anymore, and it wasn't efficient). Edge doesn't run on OS X.

I think it was fair. They showed browsers on Windows. I just wish more people would realize just how bad Chrome is at power efficiency so that Goigle might pretend to care.

So... You think MS should have run all of their tests on macOS?

How about porting Edge to Android and testing on a smartphone?

...because they care most about performance on Windows?

>It's funny how Microsoft conducted the "tests" on Chrome [1] & Firefox [2] and discreetly leave out Safari. Safari is by far a winner when it comes to efficiency. So hats off to MS for their "informative" & "thorough" test(s).

Safari also doesn't run (anymore) on Windows platforms that Microsoft targets, so it's irrelevant to their point.

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