IE8 Best at Battery Life: Report

• Author: admin
• Filed under: Tech News
• Date: Sep 16,2009

Personally, when it comes to saving battery on my laptop, I usually think of things like, oh, turning off the DVD drive, decreasing the screen brightness, that sort of thing. It never occurred to me that Firefox could be dragging my battery life down.

While the latest set of browser wars have focused on Javascript speed, among mobile devices, it’s all about battery life. Thus, AnandTech decided to use a different set of browser metrics: effect on battery life.

Obviously, if you’re browsing sites with tons of Javascript, Java, and Flash content, you’re going to see degraded battery life compared to surfing to simple sites. So how efficiently a browser can handle those sights can indeed have an effect on battery life.

Additionally, as much as advertisers might hate to admit it, ad blocking programs could help increase your battery life, too, if you block all that extra content and animation.

The question is, how much?

AnandTech used the following browsers, all against Windows, however: Apple Safari (version 4.0.3), Google Chrome (version 2.0.172.43), Mozilla Firefox (version 3.5.2), Microsoft Internet Explorer (version 8.0.6001.18813), and Opera (versions 9.6.4 and 10 Beta 3). Firefox was tested with and without Adblock, the popular freeware ad-blocking extension, and the browsers were tested against AMD and Intel notebooks as well as a netbook.

The results will disappoint Apple fans. Safari came in last in all the tests, and on the netbook, it trailed Chrome by 332 minutes to 454. I can already see the protests: “it was Windows that done it!” but AnandTech didn’t do any Mac OS testing.

IE8 was first on both notebooks and second on the netbook, where it trailed Chrome only 441 to 454. Adblock helps Firefox on the notebooks, but on the underpowered netbook, it comes in with slightly less battery life than Firefox without Adblock, showing that the extra CPU power required for parsing more than offsets what’s blocked.

Bottom line: IE8 is better overall for battery life, at the sacrifice of using what many consider to be a more “vulnerable” browser, and missing out on the tons of extensions on Firefox (and the speed of both Firefox and Chrome). Take that as you will, but I’ll stick with Firefox.