Microsoft Edge now gets even more out of your battery

I'm a huge fan of Microsoft, heavy Azure and .NET stack user, and I can't find a single nice thing to say about Edge. Yes, it crashes constantly, but it's the easy stuff that is hopelessly and inexcusably broken.

Want a dozen tabs? No problem, just don't expect to be able to switch to the ones on the right because the hit boxes for selecting the tabs are hidden behind the hit box for minimizing the window. Want to resize the window? No problem, just don't try to do it by clicking on the top edge of the window because the hit box for resizing the window is hidden behind the hit boxes for selecting tabs. Want to set the default search engine to google or anything else? No problem, just don't expect to search for anything with a dot in the name because the unbelievably poorly written regex for detecting URLs overrides the search engine behavior in the address bar, preventing your search from hitting the search engine.

The list of unbelievable simple, horribly frustrating usability issues is so long and so easy to encounter, I refuse to believe anyone on the Edge team actually uses this thing.

Oh and it crashes constantly. Did I mention that it crashes constantly? Which is a shame because In my opinion it has the nicest developer toolset of any of the major browsers.

Hopefully this pushes Chrome team to improve the terrible battery management across the board. Even on OS X, Chrome eats battery significantly faster than Safari.

Which is becoming a larger and larger problem as apps are switching away from tiny efficient native runtimes to the Chromium driven Electron hogs :/

So, I'm glad that Microsoft is focusing on a real-world pain point for people on Edge. I don't think people can be talked into switching browsers by stuff like the Cortana integration, but this might convince some. One problem is that Edge really isn't quite ready for primetime yet. There's a few sharp edges here and there that make using it about 90% pleasant enough and 10% really painful. Some of it is that I don't think the UWP is as fully-baked as the old Win32 ecosystem yet, and it makes weird compromises. The multitasking model of UWP seems to be phone-first, which is just out of place for me. When I have a desktop PC that's plugged in and has 16gb of RAM, my web browser should never just spontaneously CLOSE because I tab out to another window. I get why Edge does this, believe me. (I just got out of a two-week stretch of using a cheap Nokia Lumia as my smartphone because of problems with my main device overheating, and there's such a tension between being impressed at what Windows 10 for Phones or whatever the hell they're calling it now can do in 512mb of RAM and thinking that 512mb of RAM is incredibly frustrating to live with.) But it doesn't make sense on the majority of devices that Edge runs on. Leave my browser window open. I'm going to come back to it. Also, Microsoft really needs to break the link between Edge updates and Windows updates. This doesn't affect me much at home because I'm Fast Ring so I get Windows updates more often than I eat meals sometimes, but in general I don't think it's great for the ecosystem.

Also, if by any chance someone working on Edge is reading this thread, can you make it so I can resize the text box for adding comments to Hacker News? Chrome lets me do this, and I would probably increase my Edge usage significantly with just that fix.

At home when I'm all plugged in, I have 3 Chrome windows, each with multiple tabs, spread across my PLP setup. Whenever I pop into a client, and awake from sleep, you can almost see the battery draining in real time. Edge to the rescue; and I'm glad they're putting the pressure on Google to do better.

Pro Tip: You think Edge saves your battery? Sheeeeit....Try using the Movies & TV app vs VLC someday. M&TV is a certified power miser - I caught up on several TV shows plus The Martian on a flight from Montego Bay to Frankfurt a few months ago, using my Toshiba Encore 10" tablet that isn't exactly known for its battery life.

Unfortunately, Netflix uses DRM which limits Firefox's ability to have control over the better usage in this test. The video decoding and decryption is done by the Adobe CDM. It would be interesting to see a comparison without DRM'd video.

> To validate our improvements and make sure we’re giving our customers the best experience possible, we monitor aggregated telemetry on power consumption from millions of Windows 10 devices around the world.

I don't know how I feel about this. On the one hand, the telemetry data is obviously very useful and will allow products to be improved greatly. On the other hand, how many of the "millions" of people know the data is being collected? Did every single one of them click a button that said "I know what data you want to collect and I accept your request to take it"? Definitely not. To pull stunts like this, they need absolute transparency on the telemetry collected, the encryption/sanitation methods, how they ensure anonymity, the security of the protocols used for collection, and ideally be an opt-in not an opt-out. I don't care if they collect battery usage of my new laptop playing games, and anything important is disabled, but there's absolutely no way I'm upgrading my development PC to Windows 10 or ever installing a Microsoft product on my Linux install.

I'm waiting for the inevitable day when Windows messes with other OSes that have been dual-booted. One day we'll log in and see a pop-up saying "We've detected you recently installed <Insert Linux Distro here> to <Insert Disk Drive here>! To provide the best service possible, we've installed a full Microsoft driver/software suite and changed the theme to something more Windows-like."

Edit: As a fun side-note, when copying the quote to my clipboard it automatically appended "Read more at <link to article here." The joke about Microsoft pushing their products into Linux distros was exactly that: A joke. But secretly adding data (even harmless links) into local memory that could be unknowingly stored/put anywhere because the user has no idea is unbelievable.

I run a virtual box VM provided by Microsoft to test my website on their new browser. It surprises me how much of a resource hog Windows can be... Is there really no way to turn off cortana and on access antivirus scan? I guess it is probably fine on a real machine but it sucks on a VM on a machine with a spinning disk where Windows is just a tenant among others.

Given that what's IN my battery is "power", that title could be taken in completely the opposite direction it's intended.

sometimes I do wonder why Microsoft fanbois creep around in comment sections, downvoting everyone who doesn't fall to the ground at the amazing (not) quality of work Microsoft does

It's really cool that they published details on their measurement methodology and even made their webdriver code open-source (https://microsoftedge.github.io/videotest/2016-09/WebdriverM...). Also cool that Chrome's energy use has been improving considerably in Chrome 53, and with this being a bit of a PR battle here's hoping that energy use of both Edge and Chrome continues to improve.

They must have carefully curated the "general browsing" to sites that do not cause it to crash, as it always seems to pull a vanishing act if the site isn't coded specifically to avoid known crash points.

The most reliable way I've found to crash it is to use MutationObservers in a website. Even though Edge has support for them, I still have to pave over it with a JS version that doesn't cause the browser to crash after a few minutes of use.

Something is wrong if emulating browser features in JS leads to a better experience than using the feature as built in. Having to do so probably eliminates any battery life gains they have made.

Now this is a competition I can get behind.

Also super slow for JS. 1/5 the speed of Chrome working with our JS, which makes a huge difference in terms of usability and responsiveness.

Hope this new version is faster, but if it's optimizing for battery life then maybe it'll be worse...

How does Microsoft tweaking the OS to make Edge use the battery more efficiently translate to industry-leading efficiency? A more reliable test would be to compare browsers on another Operating System.

I don't use edge until now the only reason being no support for extensions. Since they are arriving soon it's very exciting. Finally to save some more hours on the battery!

Since now Edge has the extensions now, I'll switching before upgrading hardware. I want to see how much longer my old battery would last.

I love Edge (and loved IE Metro). It's ideal for a device like the Surface.

What about vs Safari? That's the real gold standard for battery life.

I like the text rendering in Edge, but its still pretty rough.

Thank you Microsoft!

That is what I wanted: Mandated Telemetry in everything I do so the mothership knows everything I do everytime from a product I supposedly bought.

It is so great to know that today Microsoft and the US gobertment could use all this information to improve their products or directly control the people that use their computers.