Better battery life with Microsoft Edge | Hacker News Reader

Better battery life with Microsoft Edge

blogs.windows.com

38 pointserentz45 comments

Props to the Edge team :)

Only complaint I have about Edge is how Windows pushes it down your throat. You get while setting a different browser and even AFTER setting a default browser

More details: https://github.com/brave/browser-laptop/issues/7287#issuecom...

Have they provided a way to search history? Last time I checked it was not possible from the browser itself, except visually searching.

On the other hand, seem to have introduced some tab management features.

More important to me is restoring tabs.

tab restore is there..

Microsoft can't seem to make something people want, so they have to shove it down your throat.

Apple built a walled garden to lure people in.

Microsoft is building a walled prison to trap people.

There's also no ability to uninstall Edge, the current way of doing it appears to be to delete all of the binaries in a specific folder.

That's a fairly normal thing though, generally every operating system ensures there is a browser that can always be used for internal functions. Android has chrome (previously webview I think).

TBH way less annoying than Googles constant pop up to download Chrome when using Gmail or other Gapps on IOS every time you click a link. The don't bother me setting also seems to magically reset itself periodically.

But does Windows still keep being a weirdo and notify every time in the notification bar when I use Google Chrome? It really feels like its stalking and makes me irritate.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12369326/microsoft-windows-...

I mean, as the article points out, I can't help but feel Google brought this one on themselves with browser ads on the google homepage...

Which appear even if you're using Chrome....sigh.

not to forget keeps bugging me to make google my default search engine. i mean if my default was set to ask.com maybe, if i set my default to ddg, it was probably on purpose..

and on that note, why/how are they able to detect that google isnt my default search anyway?

I've seen that message even when google is my default search engine. So I think it might just be something that shows up for everyone. I was using firefox though, perhaps Chrome + Default google will get rid of the message.

At least Windows a) only does this when on battery power, b) for a valid reason, and c) hides it in the offscreen notification area.

Every time I use Google Search in Edge a prominent pop-up window asks me to switch browsers. It's extremely frustrating!

For a valid reason?

If Edge uses ~36% less power then yes, it's a valid tip. MS are obviously also angling for more Edge users, but it does legitimately increase battery life.

Independent reviews need to be done. I can only assume bias with this post.

> These tests are repeatable by other browsers or curious users, backed by methodology documents and open source code.

https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/BrowserEfficiencyTest/

They have released their test methodology and code, so you can independently review to your hearts content.

Despite obviously wanting to be the market leader, they seem to be genuinely interested in helping everybody else up their game too. It's nice to see from such a large company

> they seem to be genuinely interested in helping everybody else up their game too

No, they are not.

The speed of Microsoft's transformation from universally hated evil FUD masters to white and fluffy friends of everyone really boggles one's mind. Just as does the gullibility and naivete of those taking it all for face value. Microsoft may be missing Balmer as a head figure, but it is the same old corporation that doesn't give a flying fuck about anything or anyone except for its own interests, which has been made abundantly clear by their past and prsent Windows 10 shenannigans. "We hear you loud and clear, you want to have better control over telemetry, so we included a choice of vaseline flavours in Creators Update." But, yeah, let's focus on their fresh coat of marketing paint with liberal sprinkle of github repos and assume that all these surely come from some other Board of directors and CEO.

Fish rots from the head. Microsoft has never been an ethical company and it still is not.

Helping Chrome or Firefox improve their battery life - on Windows 10 - improves the image of Windows laptops overall.

Yes, but the reason people are happy is because Microsoft is helping its own interest by doing things that people want. Which is a lot better than not doing things people want and furthering their own interests, because its usually not what people want. And it is something that people have been wanting for a long time.

> it is the same old corporation that doesn't give a flying fuck about anything or anyone except for its own interests

No, I don't believe it is. Their actions help themselves, their competitors and their users. That's really as good as you can hope for with a profit-driven company.

It's marketing.

Yes, but they're marketing something which benefits users and competitors. Unlike, for example, Google's constant in-your-face marketing when you use any of their services from outside Chrome. That doesn't benefit anybody but Google (assuming it even benefits them - in my case it causes a loss of respect which means nobody sees any benefit)

Companies will always engage in marketing and other profit-driven, competitive activities. Some companies manage to do so while having a positive effect on the world around them, some do not. Most long-lived companies (such as MS) will go through all the possible phases at various stages of their life.

Right now, MS is being a good player. They are releasing useful products and doing so in a way that benefits more than just themselves. They haven't always been like this, and won't always be like this, but deserve credit when they are. Like all other companies.

That's great, but I'll bet the data set was chosen to maximize their results. That being said, last year they did win an independent test: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3087338/browsers/which-browse...

Pretty awesome to see all the hard work they did just to optimize battery usage.

My problem with Edge is that even if it did currently work better than Firefox and Chrome, I still wouldn't use it, because I don't believe they will respond to new technology requirements well. They are non-responsive and have a long history of not doing what users want, but rather doing what they want. The fact that Edge and IE to this day lack very basic functionality that most users want but has other whack ass functionality that users don't want is a testament to this.

Also their handling of security flaws is often terrible.

Edge browser is very fast on low-end devices (e.g. Bay Trail Intel Atom), with super smooth scroll, and very responsive UI. Better experience than Chrome and Firefox, on devices with 1GB of RAM.

Microsoft's marketing strategy is kind of annoying to me: longer battery life is not even close to being in my top three reasons for choosing a browser.

How about getting somewhere close to supporting U2F? Not even close to becoming a reality[0]. Working with popular password management solutions in order to get them to make an Edge extension? Asking the developers for more extensions?

Any of those three would make Edge seem like a more viable browser in the future and might actually make me try it out. Battery life? Nice to have, but nowhere close to being an essential thing to me.

0 - https://github.com/MicrosoftEdge/Status/issues/358

It's good to see a focus on battery life, but:

1. using a microsoft computer for the test seems a little unfair. I should hope that a microsoft browser on a microsoft OS and a microsoft computer can get the best battery life.

2. Edge does less than the other browsers. It's not really a fair test when it's a less capable browser. When they implement ServiceWorker, Shared Web Workers, WebRTC Data Channels, shadow DOM and position:sticky then let's see how they do. As long we are comparing two browsers that don't have the same functionality, i can get even better battery life by turning my computer off and putting it on a shelf.

I would use Edge a lot more if Google Docs weren't such a mess on it. I would like to drop Google Docs altogether (I hate products that are tied to one browser like Google's are), but that isn't feasible right now.

Interesting. How bad is it? I rely a lot on Google Docs, and for this very reason (and extensions) I stick with Chrome. But that said, GSuite is such a CPU/memory hog. Gmail, in particular, has been terrible recently to the point where I went back to using Outlook for the first time in 7-8 years.

All of the icons are wrong on Edge. Makes it difficult to navigate around. Weird UX edge (ha ha ha nope) cases that exist on Edge but not on Chrome or Firefox.

I use Google docs of Firefox and Safari fine. Am I missing something?

I am glad to see that there was no auto-update and auto-force-restart during the time when you are not interacting with the computer in the battery test. It is the single most annoying feature I have ever seen.

I can't stand how Windows makes its own decisions about when to reboot my laptop. Windows shouldn't be empowered with making this decision. As the owner of the laptop, it's my call.

How long before Microsoft releases edge on other OSes? Edge for OSX/Linux? I'd try it.

You will never see that. I'm not criticizing Microsoft by saying that.

Someone should look into what kind of impact EME have on battery life.

Can we change the URL to https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/04/14/better-batter... ? It's got technical details for us technical types :)

Ok, changed from https://blogs.microsoft.com/firehose/2017/04/14/with-windows....

Very happy to see they've stopped using Channel 9.

Serious question – what was wrong with Channel 9?

The player was worse than that of youtube, and the CDN was worse than that of youtube.

Of course they'd find a way to make the battery last longer, that way they can collect more data.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com