Google Chrome bad for your laptop's battery, claims Microsoft

'Laptops using Microsoft Edge lasts 70 per cent longer than ones running Chrome'

Anyone who has ever used Google Chrome knows that although the browser is great, it drains your laptop’s battery really quickly.

Targeting the Chrome’s weak spot, Microsoft in a recent blog said conducted tests prove Chrome is a battery hog, claiming that laptops using Microsoft Edge lasted 70 per cent longer than ones running Chrome.



To measure the actual power usage during typical browsing activities, Microsoft said it connected a Surface Book to specialised power monitoring equipment and automated all four browsers Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera to perform the same series of activities: opening websites, scrolling through articles, and watching videos, opening new tabs for each task.

It used the same websites that most of the people spend their time on – Facebook, Google, YouTube, Amazon, Wikipedia and more.

Average power consumption per browser based on billions of data points of aggregated telemetry.PHOTO: MICROSOFT

Microsoft says the tests showed Edge is a more energy-efficient browser on Windows 10 and gives you as much as 70% more battery life than Google Chrome and laptops running Edge lasts 43% longer than Firefox.

While Surface Book using Edge lasted for over 7 hours and 20 minutes, one running Chrome lasted for just 4 hours and 19 minutes. One using Opera fared relatively better as it lasted 6 hours and 18 minutes; still an hour less than Edge.



To further substantiate its claim that Edge is better than rest of the lot, the company is also releasing aggregated telemetry data from millions of Windows 10 machines pointing out that show Microsoft Edge and Firefox are both more power efficient than Google's Chrome browser.

However, Edge is far far away from winning the browser war.

Despite the fact that it comes pre-installed with all of the nearly 300 million Windows 10 out there, the latest data from tracking authority W3Counter revealed the combined market share of Microsoft's Edge and Internet Explorer browsers is meagre 10.3%, compared to whopping 58.7% share of Google Chrome, Business Insider reported.


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