[overgryphon]

Microsoft didn't just do a battery test, they also release statistics based on Windows 10 telemetry showing that Edge has better battery life than Chrome, Firefox:

"In addition to testing battery life internally, Microsoft also looks at tens of millions of PCs that send telemetry data to the firm, Weber said. And what it sees there is simple: A small advantage over Firefox, but massive gains of about 50 percent additional battery life when compared to Chrome."

https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/68176/microsoft-...

[Splines]

Not to discredit their results, but what it shows is that users who used Edge consumed less power than Chrome or Firefox.

Whether that means Edge is more power efficient, or devices where Edge is used more often are more power efficient, or users who select for Edge tend to visit sites that allow Edge to be more power efficient isn't clear.

To be fair to both sides, this is a really hard thing to measure.

[AnthonyMouse]

> To be fair to both sides, this is a really hard thing to measure.

Is it though? It's more the fact that Big Data is totally useless because it contains thousands of uncontrolled variables that confound the results.

If you really want to know which browser is more power efficient, get a sample of the commonly visited sites and then visit the same sites on the same common devices in different browsers and see which one uses less power.

You can still get the wrong outcome by using a biased sample on purpose, but then the outcome is wrong because you fudged it, not because it's hard to get the real answer.

[tgb]

That's what opera just did!

[admax88q]

That's also what Microsoft did.

It's quite possible that both results are valid. It sounds like there's big difference in the sites that Microsoft visited compared to Opera.

It seems an even better methodology would be to record actual user browsing sessions, and then replay them through different browsers and measure power consumption.

Opera's simulated browsing session does not sound particularly sophisticated IMO.

[Aelinsaar]

Couldn't you just make a giant virtual "browsing session" with hundreds of thousands of different sites , and crunch the numbers to minimize the background noise? MS has the computing power, that's for sure.

[bzbarsky]

Except that this has an interesting failure mode: unless you're visiting the sites by hand you're presumably using some browser automation framework, with different implementations for different browsers. And _those_ can have nontrivial power usage, depending on how they work. I know for a fact some of them do power-hungry continuous polling...

[dhaivatpandya]

It seems pretty unlikely that the data wouldn't be normalized by some metric of intensity of use since this is pretty much the first thing anyone would think of. Normalizing even by something as simple as "number of websites visited" would, I imagine, significantly reduce the contribution of such factors to the differences observed.

[matmann2001]

Or they just ignore normalization, since it's for PR and not an actual scientific study meant to withstand scrutiny.

[harigov]

The fact that they spent so much money in hardware to test the battery usage and the amount of effort they put in to improve doesn't seem to imply that this was just a PR stunt.

[matmann2001]

You underestimate the value attributed to PR by large corporations.

[KirinDave]

> Not to discredit their results, but what it shows is that users who used Edge consumed less power than Chrome or Firefox.

The workloads Microsoft simulated were held constant for every platform and instrumented via a common command-and-control testing library. It is very much apples-to-apples. The additional telemetry they released is even more confirmation.

Opera replied by enabling a pair of special default-off features, both of which significantly change the workload and the user experience for their browser, put it on a random laptop pair which might not even be from the same lot or subtly different models, and then made a timelapse.

[Splines]

> The workloads Microsoft simulated were held constant for every platform and instrumented via a common command-and-control testing library. It is very much apples-to-apples.

I'm not doubting this part at all.

> The additional telemetry they released is even more confirmation.

The additional telemetry doesn't really tell much of a story either way, given that it's presented as a single chart and little context is provided. Unfortunately there's no link to the data analysis to understand what factors were considered when looking at the data sets involved.

Personally I've found that it's hard to come to these high-level conclusions about performance from large data sets, because users and their devices are so incredibly diverse. It's really hard to draw definitive conclusions given all the data.

It's dangerous to take your data, aggregate it at a high level and look at the results from that point of view - you lose the context under which it was gathered and can come to the wrong answer (for example, browser X is popular in a country with great internet, so page loads are faster, and browser Y is popular in a country with terrible internet, so page loads are slower).

[cronjobber]

> they also release statistics based on Windows 10 telemetry showing that Edge has better battery life

It's such a pity I don't use Microsoft Windows 10, because I'd be so thrilled to know that through the magic of telemetry, everything I do on a Microsoft Windows 10 enabled computer could help Microsoft win some crucial PR battles.

[KirinDave]

As opposed to your Apple iPhone where through the magic of telemetry every app is dumping your every finger motion into services like Mixpanel and Kahuna for later analysis.

For clarity, they captured the extremely detailed telemetry from their test devices. Most of the telemetry that Microsoft ships back to the mothership is the exact kind of telemetry that apps from the Apple Store, iOS Store, Android Store and Chrome Web Store submit: app specific telemetry. Many of these include signals that help understand battery life impact, so every major application platform (including the web) is doing this.

That stuff–stuff you agree to in the EULA as it stands– is absolutely essential to improving app experience to the standards of the market. The reason the mobile ecosystem has developed so fast (and that the web ecosystem can develop so fast) is a whole lot of telemetry on user usage patterns, habits, device failures, device selection, etc.

I'm not sure why it's so controversial. Even the Ubuntu store apps can administer telemetry.

If you'd like to complain about the pervasive surveillance state in your national scale, there are more fruitful avenues.

[megablast]

> As opposed to your Apple iPhone where through the magic of telemetry every app is dumping your every finger motion into services like Mixpanel and Kahuna for later analysis.

This is not true at all. And there is a difference between your smartphone and your laptop, even if you can't see it.

[MikeHolman]

Yes, telemetry from my smartphone is even more invasive to my privacy, having my location at all times, as well as being the single location with all my communications.

[KirinDave]

Just one of many links on Google for an appropriate search string. This one is dated and no longer accurate, but the phenomenon still occurs.

http://lifehacker.com/lets-talk-about-apples-privacy-issues-...

They have and they do, on every device. And that's ignoring app specific telemetry, which is explicitly allowed on all app stores.

It is one thing to not want to share that data. It's another entirely to invoke a 7+ year old corporate culture as evidence Microsoft is the sole "bad" actor in the space when every vendor openly discusses their telemetry collection.

How much did we hear about Chrome telemetry at I/O and PWAS? A lot. More to come. And it's necessary to make software products affordable o produce, unfortunately.

[AdmiralAsshat]

Don't worry, for your convenience, that Telemetry technology was backported to Windows 7 and Windows 8 as well.

There are some programs out there that can help block/disable it.[0]

[0] https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/

[Ezhik]

I wonder if we can make a bot that posts a telemetry comment on every article with "Windows 10" in the title.

[cortesoft]

Is that telemetry data able to determine how much of the battery is being used by just the browser? It would seem difficult to me to distinguish between battery power used by a browser, and say, code compiling in the background while I surf the web.

People who use the Edge browser may do less on their computers while web browsing than people who use chrome?

[reitanqild]

Which is impressive I guess given that Firefox users often use extensions of varying quality?

[DasIch]

I'm sure there are a lot of Firefox extensions of questionable quality but I would expect that at least the popular ones are of fairly decent quality. I also would assume that only a small minority of users know about and actually use extensions.

Even people who do use extensions probably don't really use more than an adblocker.

[mynewtb]

Adblock Plus is very popular and very inefficient: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-vs.-ABP:-effic...

[AnthonyMouse]

An extension doesn't have to be popular to be significant. 1% of people accidentally installing some spyware crap that slows down the browser by 50,000% is going to move the needle.

[hristov]

So Microsoft is great based on some secret data that we have no access to. Which microsoft collects from my computer without my knowledge. And it is all collected by their opaque closed source os. But hey they may be right. Nothing stops them from adding code in windows 10 that intentionally wastes power whenever the user is running chrome.

The more i read this the more pissed off i feel about using windows 10. Unfortunately, they made it very hard to install another OS on new laptops.

[KirinDave]

You can intercept this data with a proxy and your own root SSL cert if you want. MS doesn't do certificate pinning unlike some people in this space.