Browser Face-Off: Battery Life Explored 2014
by Stephen Barrett on August 12, 2014 6:00 AM ESTFinal Words
A lot of technology has changed in five years, and not surprisingly, so have our browser battery life results. Nearly everyone is used to changing their display brightness to conserve battery, but changing browsers might be a wise move as well. Most interestingly, changing to Google Chrome 36, despite its known power consumption bug, is apparently a wise move as far as battery life is concerned. However, that may be short lived, as Google Chrome 37 beta moved Chrome from first place to last place in our battery life results. The drop is possibly thanks to Google finally supporting HiDPI displays. Update: Chrome has been tested at 1600x900
It's interesting to note that Google's bug report thread shows they attempted to fix the timer issue in Chrome 37, but they had to revert the fix due to some failing automated tests. As of this writing, they have not yet re-implemented the fix, but they did try to add some power monitoring auto tests to their suite to keep an eye on this topic. Unfortunately, a few days later, they removed those new automated tests due to other unforeseen issues.
In terms of current standings, Microsoft still knows a thing or two about creating a power friendly browser, and the Modern UI version came in second place next to Chrome 36 on our tests. Looking forward, if Google could resolve their timer issue in a future revision (37 or later), they could potentially pass Firefox and maybe even IE. In the future, we hope to test this more often than every five years so we can keep up with browser changes, and possibly test on OS X as well.
Of course, battery life isn't the only factor to consider when choosing a browser. Personally I prefer Firefox due to the "awesome bar" that works better, in my opinion, than other web browser's address bar. Additionally, I can't reasonably use Safari or Chrome 36 on the XPS 15 because they do not properly support HiDPI rendering like IE and Firefox do- at least until Chrome 37.
Hopefully this article keeps the pressure on software authors to use power efficient APIs and autotest for power draw with each subsequent release. You can check for software that abuses the battery yourself with the command line tool powercfg /energy. I've found one other piece of software abusing high resolution timers, and I reported it to the author. Let us know in the comments if there are other applications you've encountered that don't play well with battery power.
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asmian - Saturday, August 16, 2014 - link
Please note http://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=... - the Pale Moon developer states that it does NOT use 1ms timers, and since this is directly based on FF code (and he does not state that he has changed that part of the code) it is unlikely that FF does either. Maybe there is another app causing this behaviour.lucas1024 - Thursday, August 21, 2014 - link
And yet in reality it DOES use a 1ms timer, even when all plugins and extensions, as well as hardware acceleration, are disabled. powercfg reports the timer requested by mozjs.dll.rhughesjr - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
Often beta software will not have all optimizations enabled in order to more easily debug issues. I wonder if that is the case, and would be very interested in seeing this revisited once Chrome 37 comes out of beta.Freakie - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
Would have been kind of interesting to compared 64bit Firefox (Nightly) to 64bit Chrome, just to see which 64bit version is the best for battery. Would be humorous if Firefox was.I use 64bit Waterfox myself, which even though it is a build of the latest version of Firefox, just compiled as a 64bit program. It's compiled using specific optimizations that the Firefox team doesn't use, so it wouldn't be fair to use a 64bit off-shoot version of Firefox, unfortunately.
Oxford Guy - Wednesday, August 13, 2014 - link
Yes, I was wondering why Chrome was tested for 64-bit but not Firefox. However, one might say that Mozilla has been less supportive of the 64-bit variant than Google has been of its 64-bit Chrome variant.AnnonymousCoward - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
I like Pale Moon over Firefox. No UI BS to deal with.Paapaa125 - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
It would've been interesting to see how OSX+Safari would compare to Windows+Chore on the same MacBook Pro.tuxRoller - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
Any chance of running these tests for both osx and linux (fedora, preferrably as they tend to be amongst the most vanilla [least amount of changes from upstream] of the major distros)? Linux, at least, also supports various levels of timer coalescence (timer_slack), and attempts to wakeup as little as possible when not under load. I'd imagine osx does the same.Also, firefox has beta, aurora, and nightly that are easy to get (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/#bet... , https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/#aur... , https://nightly.mozilla.org/), and chrome has the same.
Samus - Wednesday, August 13, 2014 - link
Firefox is definitely an underrated browser. It's amazing how it still gets such a bad rap from a few crap versions from years ago. Firefox has been an especially superior browser, in my opinion, since the customizable menu center released earlier this year.xype - Wednesday, August 13, 2014 - link
This is kinda stupid. Compare Firefox, Chrome and Safari on OS X and Firefox, Chrome and IE on Windows, if you want to get a good idea of the differences between browsers. Eventually Chrome and Firefox on Linux, too, if you have too much time.As it is, the Safari "part" is meaningless, and without Safari you don’t even have a "Browser Face-Off". And having Firefox and Chrome compared between Windows and OS X (and Linux) would at least allow people to get a good idea of how much of a difference the operating system makes in these tests.
I expected a better article, but then, this is still better than no article (and no information), so thanks for it anyway.