IE 9 looks set to roll out to users via the Windows Update in late June and for many that could see improvements in their laptop battery life performance, at least that’s if the latest tests from Microsoft are true. Some may consider this a biased study since Microsoft carried out the tests, and inevitably IE came out on top.
However, I’m going to be the middle man in this case, and assume that the test was carried out fairly. Microsoft compared Internet Explorer 9, their latest browser with Opera 11, Firefox 4, Chrome 10 and Safari 5 on an Intel powered laptop. They then measure just how many watts the machine consumed with the browser idling, showing a news site and then running some graphic intensive web tasks.
The results? Well Internet Explorer came out as the most efficient web browser.
Obviously Microsoft were proud of this achievement, as IE 9 is said to be a big change from it’s predecessors, and that it is.
However there is plenty of factors which could affect the result. The tests were carried out on a Windows 7 machine with an Intel chip, both of which Internet Explorer is designed to run best on. If you we’re to try Safari on the Mac, a platform which Safari is optimised to run on, I think you could find some different results.
Also the test sites that Microsoft used may not be ones anyone else would care to use and all laptops have different rates of power consumption, in fact there is an awful lot of variables in this test which aren’t factored in.
In fairness to Microsoft though, we appreciate you for caring about power consumption and the environment, and I’m sure we’d all love to have a bit of extra battery life from our laptops
Actually, this very much reflects my experience so far with IE 9, FF 4, and Chrome 10. IE 9 and FF 4 are just about even and Chrome is much less energy efficient. Personally, I think this makes sense since Microsoft and Mozilla took their time with their new browsers whereas Google seems to thow out another version every few weeks at this rate. I haven’t used Safari or Opera in quite some time so I have no point of reference for those….
Stephen
yes packed up with ie8 a year ago went to firefox liked it for a while but then went to chome which i did like but java kept crashing but always kept ie but did not use .then got update with ie to 9 so tryed it out. one week later its the only brower on my laptop [top class love it]