If you're a fan of deja vu or Microsoft Edge, you are going to enjoy this. Remember those battery tests between browsers that Microsoft did soon after the Anniversary Update was rolled out to the public, to prove that Edge was the most efficient of them all? Well, the company has done it again. The Creators Update started rolling out to the general public earlier this week, so the Redmond company redid the battery tests with unsurprising results - Edge won.
This time, however, the company came all prepared. It posted its testing methodology before another browser could question the results. The said browser itself is conspicuously missing from these tests, though. The company measured the time it took for three identical Surface Book laptops to fully run through their respective batteries while streaming videos from Vimeo via different browsers, in full-screen. The machines were running the build 10563 and were connected to the internet via Wi-Fi.
The results were recorded for all to see:
Edge lasted 77% longer than Firefox and 35% longer than Chrome in this test, according to Microsoft. Edge persisted a whopping 12:31:08 hours (751 minutes) while the machine running Firefox gave up in 7:04:19 hours (424 minutes). Chrome stopped just over three hours short compared to Microsoft's browser, lasting for 9:17:03 hours (557 minutes). Other measures taken by the team included disabling Bluetooth, Location, and updates. Brightness was set to 75% and Quiet Hours were enabled. Funnily enough, the volume was set to mute.
In terms of the Surface Book hardware specifications, they included a Core i5-6300U processor, 8GB RAM, and an Intel HD 520 graphics card. The machines played this video on loop until the battery died out.
Given that Chrome still dominates the browser space by a large margin, Edge will need a lot more than battery tests on its side. Extensions, for example, are still scarce for the browser even though they were announced over a year ago. Microsoft has been hard at work on Edge, adding several important features with the Creators Update. The company is also focused on tightening the browser's security as well as allowing developers free access to different versions of Edge.
With BUILD just around the corner, Microsoft may bring Edge more into focus given that it will seemingly be the only available browser in its Windows 10 Cloud SKU.
Source: Microsoft via MSPoweruser
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