Microsoft's IE9 Saves Battery Life

Tweet

If you spend a lot of time on your laptop–I know I do; I’ve taken to using them more than I use a desktop these days–especially if you spend a lot of time on your laptop away from power outlets, then you’ll definitely want to know about this one. A recent head to head comparison of five different web browsers recently yielded some decidedly unexpected results, and the big one is that, in terms of saving your battery power, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 did the best job of sipping juice.

And for those of you right now who are horrified that Microsoft’s browser, which hasn’t had much of a good reputation of late, could do anything better than anyone else, be of good cheer; turns out that second place was none other than Mozilla’s own Firefox 4, and the difference is pretty slim–just ten minutes of difference, in fact. The rest of the list, Chrome 10, Safari 5, and Opera 11, came in in that order, with Opera sucking up the most battery juice of all.

Though you do need to take this with something of a grain of salt, as Microsoft was the one who ran the tests. They put these five browsers through their paces using a setup involving five different benchmarks, and all on Windows 7 machines. They started with Windows 7 running nothing, to establish a baseline, then followed up by having each navigate to about:blank, then to a news web site (just which they wouldn’t say), then running HTML5 Galactic (which they describe as “representative of graphical HTML5 scenario) and followed it up with a round of fish in the FishIE tank.

I have to hand it to Microsoft here; that’s a pretty robust testing system, with multiple, and steadily escalating benchmarks to give a pretty good idea of just how much power each took up. Of course, I’d like to see some independent verification by someone who doesn’t have a stake in the outcome, and conditions will vary so often across different machines that this may not be that valuable at all, but this does at least look like a pretty clean test. Let’s wait for some other results before we all go switching our browsers (and for now, I’m sticking with Mozilla.), but this does give Microsoft a little extra credibility.