IE9 is Most Energy Efficient Browser, So Says MS
Microsoft says that it has the fastest horse.
We all know the benefits of having an energy efficient system. Lower energy requirements mean bills, a smaller carbon footprint, and the immediate benefit of longer battery life.
While the first concern of power management is to have energy efficient hardware, there's always the question of what software does with the hardware. Microsoft posted a blog article on its MSDN highlighting how much it feels that Internet Explorer 9 is the winner when it comes to keeping power draw to a minimum.
Through what appears to be testing using fairly involved and reliable apparatus, Internet Explorer 9 unsurprisingly comes out on top when compared against Chrome 10, Safari 5, Opera 11 and Firefox 4. Mozilla's new browser stayed very close to Microsoft's, making it appear to be the most attractive alternative.
Microsoft monitored system power draw over a few situations: letting the browsers sit at about:blank, at a news site, running HTML5, and running the FishIE demo. In all tests, IE9 was at the top of the pack – though consider the source. Notably absent from the test was anything to do with Adobe Flash.
| Scenario | IE9 | Chrome 10 | Firefox 4 | Opera 11 | Safari 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| about:blank | 10.044 W | 7.821 W | 9.570 W | 7.704 W | 8.087 W |
| News Site | 11.042 W | 9.951 W | 10.617 W | 8.757 W | 8.835 W |
| Galactic | 13.506 W | 14.150 W | 14.995 W | 17.742 W | 17.817 W |
| Fish | 21.408 W | 24.078 W | 20.817 W | 21.769 W | 21.260 W |
| Battery Life | 3:45 hrs | 2:56 hrs | 3:35 hrs | 2:43 hrs | 2:55 hrs |

Of course.. most of the time, you will only see black screen on your monitor.
I know Im missing something, I just cant figure out watt[sic]?
If you follow the link to the source you'll see completely different results in which IE9 does have the lowest power consumption.
Tom's hardware, I am disappoint!
Im considering to switch once the IE9 plugins starts to show up!
And chrome is way better than ie in half the tests and comes close in one, only falling really behind in one test, so why the 1 hour difference?
Toms does not do any of their own testing these days. Its a copy and paste site and its sad to see Tom's like this.
Anti-reverse-non-kinda-maybe physics, mate.
I find flash isn't too bad at consuming power if you have GPU acceleration. It used to kill my Macbook's battery, now it just eats slowly at my x120e battery (GPU acceleration).