While Internet Explorer is often treated as the red-headed step child of web browsers, there is one area in which Microsoft"s browser has traditionally reigned supreme, battery life.
Microsoft"s own research has demonstrated IE"s power efficiency, and recent test results from the website 7tutorials have once again proved that IE enables user to eke out the maximum amount of battery life from their Windows laptops and tablets.
This particular test relied on the Peacekeeper battery test and was performed across a variety of devices including a Toshiba Encore 8" tablet, a Surface Pro 2, and an older HP Pavilion laptop. Each round of testing compared the performance of the latest versions of Internet Explorer (touch and desktop), Firefox, Chrome, and Opera web browsers.
On the Toshiba Encore, the touch version of IE trounced the competition with a run time of 8 hours and 52 minutes, compared to 7:45 for the desktop version of IE. The other three browsers produced similar results with approximately 6 hours of battery life.
The battery test on the Surface Pro 2, however, produced some rather odd results. The touch version of IE exhibited a battery run time that was an hour less than the desktop version of IE, an inversion of the results from the previous test. It even performed worse than the Firefox and Opera web browsers. These results are especially confusing given that both the Encore and Surface tablets run full (non-RT) versions of Windows 8. It appears that there are still some Surface Pro 2 firmware issues that remain to be addressed.
Source: 7tutorials | images via 7tutorials