Browser Face-Off: Battery Life Explored
by Jarred Walton on September 11, 2009 6:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
Closing Thoughts
Outside of Safari 4, which was clearly the worst browser choice for battery life under Windows, the major browsers offer similar battery life. We expected to see the largest difference on netbooks, where we thought the CPU and limited memory would influence the results; instead the opposite was true, where our netbook had nearly identical battery life with every browser we tested other than Safari 4. The AMD platform showed the most differentiation between browsers, so a switch might net you 10% or more battery life. Intel's platform doesn't show quite as much difference between browsers, but you could still get 5% more battery life.
Overall, Internet Explorer and Firefox + AdBlock consistently place near the top, along with Chrome. Opera 10 Beta 3 didn't do as well as Opera 9.6.4, and in a couple quick tests it doesn't appear that the final release of Opera 10 changes the situation at all. Opera in general - version 9 or 10 - looks like it doesn't do as well as the other major browsers. Safari is at the back, by a large margin on all three test notebooks. We suspect that Safari 4 does better under OS X, however, so the poor Windows result probably won't matter to most Safari users.
If you're not set on using a specific browser, battery life might be enough of a consideration to get you to try something new, but most users will probably be more concerned with features and compatibility. Based on user statistics, however, the most popular browsers are already the best choices for battery life, so change may not even be necessary. If you're one of many already using IE8, despite detractors it looks to be a good balance of features, performance, and battery life.
Finally, we're always open for suggestions on other tests you might like to see us run. If you'd like to see more of this sort of testing, let us know in the comments section.
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ProDigit - Monday, September 21, 2009 - link
I just read the Intel senior vice president is called Anand Chandrasekher. I wonder if he has anything to do with Anadtech?Wwhat - Sunday, September 20, 2009 - link
Adblock doesn't just help by blocking flash but also by preventing tons of scripts the adcompanies run I bet, you should test that by also trying it with flashblock instead of adblock if you want to be sure.JarredWalton - Sunday, September 20, 2009 - link
In progress... obviously, the impact of Flash/FlashBlock will depend on how many Flash ads are on a page as well.Starcub - Friday, September 18, 2009 - link
I just installed Safari 4 a few days ago along side Explorer 8. Then I saw this article, and when I saw the large difference between IE8 and S4, I decided to test out how much processor usage they each used. So I closed out IE8 and loaded the article up in S4 and found that both cores on my T5500 CPU went from ~5% to over 20% usage on the same page.S4 pages seemed to look nicer than on IE8, and the performance seems a little better too. S4 also has a TSR spellchecking feature enabled by default, and puts borders around text boxes. All these things, and there are probably still more default processes, require CPU cycles to execute.
I've decided I'm going to do my civic duty and use IE instead of Safari in order to reduce my carbon footprint (except on pages IE8 has problems with @!#%$!) :)
Thanks for a very informative article!
- Monday, September 14, 2009 - link
I'd love to see the different power usage differences between XP, Vista and Win7. Maybe you could test different OS's on older and new laptops, as well as older and newer desktops then compare the differneces. It could even be combined with different browsers, and see how each browser interacts with each different OS.I've heard someone say that actually XP is the most efficient power wise when they did an impromptu test of their own, but not sure whether it's really true.
If web developers could develop more green friendly web sites on the server side, and consumers on the client side could make use the best combo of efficient OS, browser and plug-ins, it would be a step in the right direction.
JarredWalton - Monday, September 14, 2009 - link
You're about one day early... I should have the results up for OS comparisons in the next day or so.Fanfoot - Monday, September 14, 2009 - link
Thought provoking piece. Also enjoyed your many well argued riposts to the various trolls here. Nicely done. I quite enjoy the people who won't accept that IE8 is better at power saving than other browsers simply because they don't like it.Power management is obviously just one of many reasons to choose a web browser. Personally the only thing I learned is you really shouldn't install Safari on a Windows Laptop. I'm planning to continue using Firefox for now. I'm too used to it, and all the plugins I use to switch FOR THE MOMENT.
neogodless - Monday, September 14, 2009 - link
"If there is interest, we may look at extending this testing two other laptops in the future"JarredWalton - Monday, September 14, 2009 - link
Fixed, thanks. Bad speech recognition... BAD!strandbygaard - Monday, September 14, 2009 - link
Interesting experiment. Unfortunately, the article does not help us determine which is the more efficient browser. Lowest power usage DOES NOT equal most efficient!"Work done per watt" is actually the metric we're interested in. "Work" being defined as the number of web pages you can load per watt (multiplied by the load time to get the power usage).
Consider this. If IE8 lets you run 10% longer, but Chrome gets you 40% more page views during the total runtime, it's rather obvious that Chrome would still be the most efficient choice.
What would be really interesting would be for AnandTech to redo the experiment while counting the number of page views, so we could determine the efficiency of each browser.