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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Granseth - Saturday, September 12, 2009 - link
Opera 10 has something called turbo mode to accelerate netsurfing on a slow connection. Could be interesting to know if that would help or hinder batterylife toosolipsism - Saturday, September 12, 2009 - link
Could you do comparative tests of browsers under OS X? If I can save 10% power while forced to use my battery I’ll likely do it based on your results. Also, do using plugins like ClickToFlash in Safari on OS X have any overhead that negate any power savings from turning off Flash?orthorim - Thursday, September 17, 2009 - link
YES, please test Mac too. I run OS X so the tests on Windows are meaningless to me. Presumably, Safari on OS X will be much more optimized than on Windows, and Firefox will be totally different as well.I'd like to see Safari + ClickToFlash because that's what I am running every day. And Firefox with and without Flashblock
Flash should make a huge difference on OS X because it's so poorly implemented by Adobe. Even simple Flash animations use lots of CPU on OS X, whereas on Windows they are hardly noticeable. I want to see how much ClickToFlash/Flashblock help, and which browser is the best.
Firefox
Chrome Beta
Safari
Camino
Opera (?!)
Thanks!
ltcommanderdata - Saturday, September 12, 2009 - link
If you do run browser battery life tests in OS X, can you make sure to try Safari in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes? I don't expect the browser itself to affect battery life that much between the 2 modes, but 64-bit Safari is capable of playing Flash content. I believe 64-bit Safari is still using the standard 32-bit Flash plugin, but as a separate process, giving crash stability, and using InterProcess Communication to connect the 2. I'm thinking the IPC link in 64-bit mode may use more CPU cycles reducing battery life.JarredWalton - Saturday, September 12, 2009 - link
Talk to Ryan and Anand - they're the Mac OS X people. I don't have a Mac at my place, or I'd be happy to run the tests. :-)GeorgeH - Saturday, September 12, 2009 - link
If Anand or Ryan decides to run browser tests on a Mac, they might also want to redo the test where Anand found that OSX 10.5.7 had vastly superior battery life to Vista. Given how poorly Safari under Windows did here, the methodology of that test becomes suspect.In that article Anand found that Vista running Safari offered ~75% of the battery life of OSX running Safari. Here you find that Safari under Windows offers ~75-80% of the battery life of IE (and most other "typical" Windows browsers.) Given the similarity of those numbers, perhaps Anand should have concluded that Safari/Vista is inferior to Safari/OSX, and not that OSX was the superior OS in general.
Article:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3582">http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3582
solipsism - Saturday, September 12, 2009 - link
I think that when doing OS comparisons that IE8 on Windows v. Safari 4 on OS X, then the same version of Firefox on each OS would be the most apt.foolsgambit11 - Sunday, September 13, 2009 - link
Maybe not. It's difficult to tell how optimized FF would be for each platform, while testing each OS maker's proprietary browser would ensure they've both done their best to ensure maximum optimization. Of course, ideally, the benchmarks would also test FF to see how well it does on each platform.JarredWalton - Saturday, September 12, 2009 - link
Anand's testing didn't use heavy Flash content, and that appears to be the primary issue with Safari 4 under Windows. If I switch to static images and text without Flash, as you would expect CPU usage drops to nothing after the pages finish loading.GeorgeH - Saturday, September 12, 2009 - link
That's a very valid point, but doesn't quite address what I was trying to get at.What I was trying to say is that by simply using "poorly optimized" (or however you want to phrase it) software on Vista, your battery life can drop significantly. Anand tested OS battery life by running two programs that were designed for OSX, not Vista, and found that the Vista performance deficit was almost exactly the same as the one you found by running "poorly optimized" software.
That the cuplrit in your case was almost certainly Flash (which Anand didn't run) is relevant, but doesn't address the idea that by running software in an environment that it wasn't designed/optimized for it is possible to significantly impact your battery life. To quote myself from the other article:
"I doubt it will make much difference, but in the interest of fair play I too would like to see the tests [OSX v. Vista] redone [using standard Vista programs]."