One of the big advantages that Microsoft has been promoting for its Edge browser is that it’s more battery efficient than both Chrome and Firefox. My own anecdotal experience bears this out; although I use Chrome for most browsing, I’ve found it burns battery faster than Edge under similar workloads. Whenever I’m mobile, I switch to Microsoft’s browser over Google’s.
Microsoft’s own figures use a video-playback benchmark, and the company has duly released a new comparison for the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, version 1803. Edge still comes out ahead – it lasts 98 percent longer than Mozilla Firefox, and 14 percent longer than Google Chrome – but it’s striking that the gap with Chrome has narrowed.
I’m one of those weird people who legitimately prefers Edge over other browsers on Windows, and I can say that it’s getting better with every single update. The battery life issue is a huge win over Chrome, but what’s most important to me is that Edge seems to tax my processor less, and, of course it actually looks like a Windows application, whereas Chrome looks like an outdated eyesore that stands out.
For now, I’ll keep using Edge over other browsers, but as always, I keep an eye on developments like this.
I wish they’d done more than just h.265 playback – say, multiple tabs a page loads, scrolling complex pages, etc, and measured battery life that way.
Testing only h.264 playback only shows that Edge can play h.264 videos more efficiently.
From what I’ve used of it, Edge isn’t bad, but 1) there can be compatibility or performance problems with certain sites (that’s mostly the site’s fault, not Edge’s, but it makes it hard to use Edge as your go-to browser) and 2) Edge’s customizability/configuration options feel limited. On the plus side, Edge is usually pretty snappy, is usually not a memory hog, and it has most of the modern features web developers want to use.
My bigger problem is with this testing. The only thing they tested was video playback. That may be a common use case, but I’d argue that it’s not the _main_ use case for a web browser. Additionally, they don’t even tell you what video format they were using. Was it 720p H.264 from a site like Netflix? Was it 4k WebM like what Youtube might stream? This “test” tell a person almost nothing.
The main reason I didn’t use it when I used to use Windows, was that when I turned it on, then clicked the address bar, it would take a away focus before I was finished typing, and then I’d have to click it again. God that’s frustrating. (Additionally, Windows does that all the damned time, for one popup or another, which is a BIG reason I don’t use Windows any more). This is the primary reason I never used it, but I’m curious if they ever addressed it – along with the generally very slow start-up times compared with Chrome, Opera (which also has great battery saving features) and even Firefox.
(the other reason I can’t stand Edge is the horrendous developer tools – just terrible)
Edited 2018-05-24 22:17 UTC
I disagree that Edge looks like a normal application. The titlebar is /still/ infringed on by tabs, like all modern browsers.
I have no idea why browsers have carte blanche access to use the title bar for whatever they want. The first thing I do with Firefox is unset tabsintitlebar in about:config.
Those 20 pixels are simply unimportant to save on vertical resolution. Even when using my 1280×1024 monitor I use sometimes, I’ll gladly sacrifice them to just have a real titlebar, like a normal application in a normal windowing system.
Tabs in titlebar are nice, makes them easier target… I (and I imagine most people) can sacrifice a little visual consistency with the rest of the OS for that.
And, IIRC, isn’t MS planning to bring tabbed UI to all apps in future Win10 update? I imagine it will be like tabs in Edge…
It’s all very well being efficient at playing video, but it would be much better to allow me to *prevent autoplay*. This is an absolute minimum benchmark for me, and while ever Edge fails to meet it (and an acceptable alternative does), I will *only* use it for rubbish tasks I can’t/won’t do in another browser.
Agreed. Seriously, that’s the one real thing I hate about Edge, and with ever more sites reverting to this embedded video autoplay crap, it’s like being back in the 90’s all over again. For me, if a page tries to autoplay video, it’s a sure fire way to guarantee that I won’t bother with that site or company again.
Edge, Chrome… Whatever the efficiency, it isn’t worth my privacy.