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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DanNeely - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
I suspect there would be major technical challenges in doing so. IIRC the standard browser tests just cycle loading a series of pages; this can be done in browser using a bit of javascript; making it easy to do cross platform. This test included things like opening/closing windows that need to be done outside the browser; and which makes me suspect it was done by recording and playing back user input. That would require a cross platform, OS level, UI testing tool. I'm not aware of anything capable of doing that on the market.Stephen Barrett - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
ExactlyMrSpadge - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
Thanks for this test!I'm not surprised Firefox came in almost last. I like it, but simply having a few tabs open (with adblock and flashblock active) and just leaving the browser minimized consumes a constant 2-3% CPU. That's 16 - 24% of one logical core of an i7 3770K @ 4.1 GHz!
I also encourage you to pepeat this test with a regular display. Remember that by now there's just a tiny fraction of high-DPI displays out there. The differences between those 2 tests could sheed some light onto the practical cost of running high-DPI displays.
Stephen Barrett - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
Good points. If there is time (this type if testing takes days and days) I hope to do a follow up using Opera and comparing Chrome 36 & 37 at 1600x900seapeople - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
Honestly, forget opera, nobody cares other than the two whiners who post here.But I do agree about running a normal resolution display - it's just not fair to benchmark blurry crap against crisp high res fonts and give a performance or battery life number that favors the blurry crap. That's like comparing fps between a laptop running 768p and 1440p and saying that the 768p laptop gives you better performance.
Ok, I somewhat apologize to the opera users. But seriously - it's 2014, get a normal browser. And not Safari on windows, obviously.
furnace51 - Thursday, August 14, 2014 - link
<emerges from the shadows> I agree, forget Opera, This is not the browser you are looking for <retreats back into the shadows>jabber - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
Yeah I have to say I think we'll be waiting a long time still for those super display sizes to filter down to the 'regular price' brackets.I bet this time next year most laptops will still come with 1366x768 screens. Yet my new $200 7" tablet will have a 4K screen on it.
Stephen Barrett - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
I will be oh so sad if that is true :-/and.... not surprised
DanNeely - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
I doubt we'll see them on race to the bottom laptops this side of the 15" 1366/768 panel being discontinued by manufacturers. With demand from tablets/phones pushing high volume production of high DPI panels though; I think the main barrier in the way of them being standard in $1000+ laptops is the number of windows apps that still don't play nicely with highDPI/the roughness of Windows scaling options.zodiacsoulmate - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
Chrome always eat up my battery when watching youtube @ 720p/1080p MP4, however IE11 works just great...Please test video play back ! and audio playback!
I was hoping for more testing for this matter, chrome have been quite disappointing these days