Microsoft Edge in the Windows 10 Creators Update dominates Chrome and Firefox in battery usage (video)

https://youtu.be/2wOz9MuwERs

Microsoft Edge prides itself when it comes to battery usage and efficiency. To show how Microsoft Edge’s efficiency to the world, Microsoft even released a video last year — comparing the battery usage of Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox when it comes to video playback.  With the release of Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft made some pretty major improvements to Edge to make it an even better browser in terms of power usage.

Redmond today released an updated video comparison for Microsoft Edge in the Windows 10 Creators Update — comparing the time it took three identical Windows 10 devices to run fully through their batteries when streaming a video. The results aren’t anything surprising: Microsoft Edge lasted 35% longer than Google Chrome and 77% longer than Mozilla Firefox while streaming a video from Vimeo in full screen. Microsoft Edge lasted 12 hours and 31 minutes, Google Chrome lasted 9 hours and 17 minutes, while Mozilla Firefox only lasted 7 hours and 4 minutes.

For the curious minds, Microsoft Edge used three identical Surface Book devices with the Intel Core i5-6300U (clocked at 2.4GHz), 8GB of RAM, and the Intel HD Graphics 520 GPU. The test was done on Microsoft Edge 40.15063.0.0, Google Chrome 57.0.2987.133 (64-bit) and Firefox 52.0.1 (32-bit).

There are some pretty important features Microsoft disabled for the test. For instance, the volume of the devices was set to mute during the test, display brightness was set to only 75%, Quiet Hours were enabled (i.e. notifications were disabled), both Bluetooth and location was disabled, and the battery saver was set to kick off at 20% battery. Without the volume set to mute and things like Quiet Hours disabled, all of the three browsers won’t likely last this long. But then again, you probably won’t stream a video for more than 3-4 hours in real life scenarios.