[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...