IE8 = Longer Battery Life on Laptops?
A recent test shows that Internet Explorer 8 provides more laptop battery time than Firefox, Chrome, and other browsers.
There's nothing worse than trolling through your favorite video-related website and the laptop suddenly gives up the ghost, or a twenty-page document is ultimately lost because the last drop of battery juice wasn't long enough to save the file. Savvy laptop owners look for ways to reduce the load on the battery by turning off junk applications and services, however AnandTech recently discovered that battery life can be extended by using certain web browsers.
Our friends at AnandTech tested the latest version of the most popular Windows browsers on three different laptops: Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 2, Firefox 3.5.2, Opera 10.0b3, and Safari 4. Believe it or not, Microsoft's latest browser offering won in the taste test, providing a whopping 5 to 10 minutes of additional battery life in comparison to the other power leeches; a super-long thirty minutes more than Apple's graphic-intensive Safari browser.
To perform the browser benchmark, ArandTech used Gateway's NV5807u (Intel-based) and NV5214u (AMD-based) laptops as well as the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA (Intel Atom). The Gateway laptops were running Windows Vista, and the Eee PC running Windows XP. Although Internet Explorer 8 provided more battery time on both laptops, Firefox with AdBlock trailed behind by mere minutes, followed by Chrome 2; Firefox 3.5.2 sat in fourth position on the AMD laptop while Opera 9.64 was fourth on the Intel-based laptop.
As for the ASUS Eee PC, Chrome 2 actually provided longer battery time, followed by Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 and Opera 9.64. As AnandTech pointed out, Safari 4 was the worst choice for battery life under Windows, however the site speculates that Apple's browser performs better in OS X.
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Who'd have thought it?
I would trade 7min of battery life for not having to use IE. Maybe if it was half an hour.
I wonder why though... IE8 being IE at the end of a day is still probably using worse codebase than for example Opera... so how come it uses less CPU? Or maybe it's not the CPU as such but the RAM? But then again - it should not matter how much RAM you use - the refresh cycle on any memory module will always require same amount of power (unless there is something clever in place that refreshes only the cells used? - I doubt to be honest)... Unless obviously we take a 512MB machine and ask it to load intense pages - then I could agree - FF uses shitloads of memory... Opera does not use that much... so again - oh why oh why?
It just shows how crap IE is if this is a usability point!
So having a slower browser will also cost you that 7 to 10 minutes over the life of the battery.
So it is a useless test.
Take that, open-source hippies!
I think I'll stick with Firefox, because I can't bare the pain of using IE.
It might actually purely down to some good coding from Microsoft - now there's a thought!! Seriously though, it could be the page rendering code that simply works in a more efficient way in terms of using the Video card or CPU or a combination of both. Love 'em or hate 'em there is no denying that MS will have a biggere R&D budget and stronger ties to hardware vendors that will let them produce the best possible code. On the negative side, you could argue that they gain their power saving by not rendering the pages properly, through liberal application of the HTML standard, which they have been accused of before.
It could be that they have loads of 'System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(10)' commands in the code
, this would make it slower and use less CPU.