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 |