Microsoft Benchmarks Browser Power Consumption

[Tharic-Nar]

Power consumption is a topic that we spend a fair bit of time talking about through a lot of our content, especially with regards to graphics cards and processors. But, I can honestly admit that one piece of technology where power consumption has never come to mind is... with a Web browser. Admit it... you likely haven't either (and if you have, kudos!).

You can read the rest of our post and discuss here.

[Tharic-Nar]

I dare say, this doesn't prove much and in fact makes me ask more questions. Flash was not included in the tests (as stated later in the comments), but was it disabled in Chrome due to having it built in? What about the complexity of WebApps that are AJAX, Ruby, JS heavy...

Flash is the real power killer along with inefficient JS... I'm more concerned about that than what the browser does at idle...

Flash Ads and Spam... doing their bit for global warming...

[Rob Williams]

Originally Posted by Tharic-Nar

I dare say, this doesn't prove much and in fact makes me ask more questions. Flash was not included in the tests (as stated later in the comments), but was it disabled in Chrome due to having it built in? What about the complexity of WebApps that are AJAX, Ruby, JS heavy...

Flash is the real power killer along with inefficient JS... I'm more concerned about that than what the browser does at idle...

Flash Ads and Spam... doing their bit for global warming...

I bet Flash cranks up the power consumption so much that the results wouldn't even mean much. I guess the author's idea was just to make the results as repeatable as possible, and not introduce technologies like that.

[Kougar]

That's exactly it. I've closely monitored laptop battery tests for years... what makes or breaks a browser or "web surfing" usage battery test is flash. Flash forces the processor to stay more active and that simply results in more power use, and it adds up quickly after a few hours with a single flash-based page active in a tab.

It's kind of silly Microsoft decided to ignore that given it accounts for something like 10-50x the power consumption versus a browser open to a basic webpage. At least they are looking at battery life though, because that's the next major thing they need to address with their OS. Hopefully it'll spur some development on that front elsewhere within Microsoft.