Microsoft Highlights Edge Browser On Windows 10 While Slamming Chrome’s Horrible Battery Drain

The PC market is skewed towards customers that use notebooks, tablets and 2-in-1 convertibles, hence making the best of your machine’s available battery is paramount for people who aren’t able to plug into a wall at a moment’s notice. To highlight the disparity between Edge and Chrome, Microsoft conducted some controlled labs tests to see how each browser handled the pressure of a typical user’s browser load. Microsoft even added in Firefox and Opera as two additional competitors for its testing regimen.

“We connected a Surface Book to specialized power monitoring equipment and measured the actual power usage during typical browsing activities in Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera,” wrote Jason Web, Web Platform Team Director for Edge. “We then automated each browser to perform the same series of activities: opening websites, scrolling through articles, and watching videos, opening new tabs for each task. We used the same websites you spend your time on – Facebook, Google, YouTube, Amazon, Wikipedia and more.”

As you can see by the results above, Edge came out ahead of Chrome under identical workloads. Opera (operating in battery saver mode) and Firefox surprisingly performed even worse than Chrome. But Chrome’s penchant or chewing through your battery really reared its ugly head during the video streaming test.

The Surface Book streaming video with Chrome threw in the towel after just 4 hours and 22 minutes. Firefox last roughly 50 minutes longer, while Opera gave up after 6 hours and 18 minutes. Not surprisingly, given that this was a Microsoft test, Edge lasted an amazing 7 hours and 22 minutes before the Surface Book cried “uncle”.

For the cherry on top, Microsoft also released aggregated telemetry data showing battery consumption per browser using billions of data points from the hundreds of millions of Windows 10 devices around the globe. Again, the results don’t look to pretty for Chrome:

Again, all of this is not surprising news to any of us that have used Chrome in the past (or continue to use the browser). Microsoft obviously wants more people to use Edge, and this is a good way to show customers the real word benefits of switching.