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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zodiacsoulmate - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
Also where is the CPU load graph? would love to see it !NatePo717 - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
Could we see some numbers for Pale Moon?BillBear - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
Safari is already scriptable using OSX's built in Applescript scripting system, so you don't have to invent anything new. At worst you'll have to pick up a bit of a new scripting language.I'm looking forward to seeing how Apple's claim that they spank the other browsers on energy efficiency pan out..
Oxford Guy - Wednesday, August 13, 2014 - link
There is also a program called Automator. http://macosxautomation.com/mabellon - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
Could you clarify the following please: "Additionally, the browsers are all run in private browsing mode to prevent local content caching from interfering with reloading our limited set of server-cached sites."Don't most browser have one big session for all in-private tabs? So there will be caching across tabs and sites until you close every instance?
Please consider using a more standard laptop in the future. A quad core 37W CPU seems incredibly unrealistic. Something more along the lines of a 15W/17W CPU would make sense. The power profile of an ultrabook will likely be vastly different to this beast. That would seem to matter a lot more given the trade off in rushing to idle, and the cost of idle wakeups will vary by CPU by some amount. Just my 2c.
Stephen Barrett - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
Good question. The automated test does open up several private browsing tabs but it closes them all (and the entire browser) between iterations.Intel power gates unused cores so there shouldn't be too much difference between a dual core and a quad core for idle power. I agree it would be interesting to test other hardware as well. Unfortunately these tests already take days, so using an even lower power laptop will make it take a really really long time and would probably just exacerbate the differences we already observed even more.
KhalidShaikh - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
Great write up.lucas1024 - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
Bad news - I checked the timers with Firefox on two different machines and on both Firefox is maintaining a 1ms timer.linj - Wednesday, August 13, 2014 - link
I can confirm this. Tested Firefox with a new profile (no extensions), and navigating to most websites (but especially Flash-enabled ones) will ramp up the 1ms timer. Closing down to even a blank page doesn't release it.Stephen Barrett - Wednesday, August 13, 2014 - link
Strange. I did not see that in my testing. I wonder what the difference was.