There's nothing worse than trolling through your favorite video-related website and the laptop suddenly gives up the ghost, or a twenty-page document is ultimately lost because the last drop of battery juice wasn't long enough to save the file. Savvy laptop owners look for ways to reduce the load on the battery by turning off junk applications and services, however AnandTech recently discovered that battery life can be extended by using certain web browsers.
Our friends at AnandTech tested the latest version of the most popular Windows browsers on three different laptops: Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 2, Firefox 3.5.2, Opera 10.0b3, and Safari 4. Believe it or not, Microsoft's latest browser offering won in the taste test, providing a whopping 5 to 10 minutes of additional battery life in comparison to the other power leeches; a super-long thirty minutes more than Apple's graphic-intensive Safari browser.
To perform the browser benchmark, ArandTech used Gateway's NV5807u (Intel-based) and NV5214u (AMD-based) laptops as well as the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA (Intel Atom). The Gateway laptops were running Windows Vista, and the Eee PC running Windows XP. Although Internet Explorer 8 provided more battery time on both laptops, Firefox with AdBlock trailed behind by mere minutes, followed by Chrome 2; Firefox 3.5.2 sat in fourth position on the AMD laptop while Opera 9.64 was fourth on the Intel-based laptop.
As for the ASUS Eee PC, Chrome 2 actually provided longer battery time, followed by Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 and Opera 9.64. As AnandTech pointed out, Safari 4 was the worst choice for battery life under Windows, however the site speculates that Apple's browser performs better in OS X.
