Microsoft: Internet Explorer 10 Is The Most Energy-Efficient Browser
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
They do not make recommendations or conclusions for MS, it is MS that interprets study's results. If looked at power draw, the difference between browsers is small, but IE has an advantage albeit small. Also, the study was done by Kurt Roth of MIT-Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy and looking at the pdf, it shows.
The obvious truth is that Microsoft will only commission a study on something they've already proven to themselves internally. As will every other company on the planet.
(Note I am an avid Mozilla fan.)
IE10 is a great step forward, now if they would render with WebKit...
I have started threads here before about this and I'm not alone, I use it because the dev tools are awesome.
http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/browser_...
EDIT: reading the PDF, this seems to be the case: they claim an at-desktop baseline of 14.7W average for the six notebooks they tested. Actual baselines for the notebooks tested varied from 9.76W to 22.65W, and the most strenuous test adds 3.11W-6.92W depending on the machine (and oddly enough, it wasn't always YouTube that had the highest power draw - on one machine, it was Bing, if the data is to be believed).
http://blogs.windows.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2013/06/05/internet...
Here's the top chart (left) and the same chart except with a less misleading Y-axis (right):
Look at the "Flash Video" and "HTML5 Video" bars in the original chart. The blue IE bars are roughly half the size of the green Chrome bars, which might lead you to believe that IE only consumes roughly half of the energy that Chrome consumes in those tests. But as the numbers show, the difference isn't nearly that great.
Starting the Y-axis at 18 watts only serves to make IE's advantage over the other browsers look greater than it actually is.
Needless to say, the authors did a poor job of following standard ethical practices when presenting information to support their claim.
Here's the graph corrected for both zero-baseline and using a column graph: http://i.imgur.com/24UrJpB.png
There's a reason Mashable exists, we don't need another site publishing a advertisement as a story.
I am not looking to optimize energy usage with a browser; I am looking to optimize speed and security.
Complete straw man .
However, this is mostly caused by poor drivers and firmware, and both Microsoft and Intel have lately been pressuring the rest of the PC ecosystem to clean up their act so that devices like ultrabooks can be viable. The resulting improvements will help other browsers just as much as IE.
And admittedly it is in detail including sites used and test bed.
The difference in power draw upon firing IE, Mozilla and Chrome is small, but it is there. In both, flash and bare bones tests. I do not know how big of a difference it will make on portable computers though.
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1. Totally made this up. The point being that nobody chooses a car based on the thread-count of the material in the seats. And nobody chooses a browser based on the power draw.
The interesting thing though is that power draw can run counter to other goals. Getting the best possible framerate can often mean higher power draw, even though a higher framerate usually means your code is running 'faster' - if you go from running on one core to four cores, you are probably increasing the CPU's power draw (and heat dissipation too, which means more power spent running the fans). But maybe if running on four cores lets you finish early enough, you can put the whole app to sleep while you wait for the next vsync, saving power. Ultimately, you have to test this stuff, then tune, then test again.
I expect IE's power savings are mostly due to its architecture. IIRC they do a lot of their isolation via threads instead of processes, which means they can use much cheaper communication mechanisms between their isolation zones, and that's going to add up. I expect their rendering architecture for plugins is also significantly more efficient than NPAPI (though I wonder if it can beat PPAPI), since they have the ability to more or less dictate how things should be done, and ActiveX plugins have been using GDI/DirectX for ages, automatically tapping into hardware surfaces and acceleration. IE9/IE10 also led the way in terms of fast, pervasive hardware acceleration for browser rendering - while Firefox and Chrome had HW accel first in certain scenarios, IE was early to the game when it comes to using hardware to render entire pages.
P.S. People who say power draw doesn't matter in a browser have obviously never used a laptop or a cell phone before. Do you think Apple and Google don't try to optimize power draw on iOS and Android devices?
That would explain why the power draw for other browsers was fluctuating depending upon websites surfed and IE seemed kind of consistent.
"In addition, at the request of Microsoft we set the JavaScript timer frequency to “conserve power” in the Windows power options. We found, however, that the default Javascript time frequency for all computers tested was set to “maximum performance.” We did not investigate the impact of this setting upon browser power draw."
So yeah, IE got some optimization applied, and unfairly so, since the other browsers were run with default settings.
For almost all my devices, this is the one I care about most.
The problem with Flash Player is that people create busy loops in ActionScript, especially in ads. You open a dozen tabs, one of them has one of these ads, your CPU is pegged. If you're worried about "browser power consumption" and your first step is not to shoot Flash Player in the head, you're doing it wrong.
The graph linked[1] does not show that much of a difference between different browsers - the difference appears exaggerated because the scale on the Y-axis does not start at zero. Thus, it is very likely that whatever power saving that you will derive are negligible and don't make a difference in the grand scheme of things.
[1] - http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/browser_...
Unfortunately Lynx doesn't support html5 video.
I think it would be more likely they would use one of the OSS engines out there and rebuild IE on top of a fork.