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by rayiner 2631 days ago
I liked Edge because of its fantastic battery life (for browsing, Edge was like having a 25% larger battery.) I was annoyed that many sites seemed to be Chrome-specific, including some I absolutely need to rely on. I switched to Brave, and it's amazing. Chrome-based, but somehow results in far better battery life than Chrome.
1 comments
pcwalton 2631 days ago
> I liked Edge because of its fantastic battery life (for browsing, Edge was like having a 25% larger battery.)

For what it's worth, I suspect this is the result of using the system DirectComposition. If you look at the more recent additions to that API, they're essentially just CSS 3. Basically, Windows integrates portions of CSS deeply into its OS stack, like macOS does with Core Animation. It's sad that moving to Chromium will regress this elegant architecture, as saving the extra blits that come from doing everything at the application level as Chromium mostly does (except for video playback IIRC) is a nice power and performance improvement.

> Chrome-based, but somehow results in far better battery life than Chrome.

Most likely because of ad blocking.

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rayiner 2631 days ago
Neat, I didn't even know that existed.

> Compositions and animations created by DirectComposition are passed to a built-in component of Windows called Desktop Window Manager (DWM) for rendering to the screen. Therefore, no special rendering components or UI frameworks are required on the computer.

Wow. Everything old is new again: https://nnc3.com/mags/LM10/issue/04/Berlin.pdf.

(As an aside, Berlin has somehow almost completely disappeared from Google. I had trouble remembering the name, and I searched "display server scene graph corba" and it didn't come up in the first few pages. Finally found this slashdot announcement: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/02/11/24/189226/fresco-m1-re...)

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pcwalton 2631 days ago
Yeah, it's neat. The long-term goal is to move Firefox to use DirectComposition as much as it can, by the way, by integrating it into WebRender. I've done some work on this with the "planeshift" library. I wouldn't be surprised if Chromium eventually does the same (as it already uses Core Animation on macOS).
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