

Microsoft: Internet Explorer 10 Is The Most Energy-Efficient Browser - thegarside
http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/05/microsoft-internet-explorer-10-is-the-most-energy-efficient-browser-uses-up-to-18-less-power-than-chrome-and-firefox/

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jmhain
Wow, how crazy is it that every scientific study by Microsoft happens to prove
the superiority of their products! What a lucky coincidence, since we all know
they would _never_ fudge the results.

~~~
iamshs
To be fair, the study's authors have made it clear in the study's pdf that it
was commissioned on Microsoft's request and other requests that MS made and
how the test beds were running. It looks fairly neutral and can be replicated.

They do not make recommendations or conclusions for MS, it is MS that
interprets study's results. If looked at power draw, the difference between
browsers is small, but IE has an advantage albeit small. Also, the study was
done by Kurt Roth of MIT-Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy and looking
at the pdf, it shows.

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bhauer
The anti-Microsoft air is thick enough in here that it stings my eyes.

(Note I am an avid Mozilla fan.)

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cl8ton
I noticed that as I sit here reading the comments in Chrome that has 4gb of
memory consumed and 2 cores almost pegged.

IE10 is a great step forward, now if they would render with WebKit...

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rbanffy
According to top, Chrome is behaving very well here. CPU load is below 10% as
I type and memory footprint, although not negligible, is well within what I
would consider reasonable (under 1 GB for 4 Gmail tabs and a couple less
clever sites). Pegging two cores seems excessive. What are you running?

~~~
cl8ton
Windows 7 w/ 4 core & 16gb, Chrome will spawn processes like rabbits breeding
if I leave it running too long (>4 days).

I have started threads here before about this and I'm not alone, I use it
because the dev tools are awesome.

~~~
rbanffy
Interesting... maybe it's something specific to Chrome on Windows or,
possibly, a plugin. I'm running it both at home and at work and it stays happy
even after a week on Esser machines.

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chipsy
I'm pretty sure the title would belong to something like Lynx.

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cpdean
Lynx will get the title as soon as Adobe releases a flash plugin for it.

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rbanffy
I'm quite sure disabling Flash is the single most important optimization one
can use on a browser when it comes to CPU, memory and energy consumption.

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mattparlane
Can't believe that no one has mentioned the chart yet -- a non-zero baseline
is highly misleading.

[http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/browser_...](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/browser_energy.png)

~~~
rwg
The misleading Y-axes on two of the charts on the IE blog post were the first
thing I noticed:

[http://blogs.windows.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2013/06/05/internet...](http://blogs.windows.com/ie/b/ie/archive/2013/06/05/internet-
explorer-10-is-the-most-energy-efficient-browser-on-windows-8.aspx)

Here's the top chart (left) and the same chart except with a less misleading
Y-axis (right):

<http://i.imgur.com/zI1UJeS.png>

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iamshs
How is that misleading Y-axes? The intervals are same, only thing that will be
different is the resolution, and going into that fine resolution amplifies the
difference. I will not say it as misleading in a slightest bit.

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rwg
The Y-axis should've started at 0 watts, not at (a rather arbitrary) 18 watts.

Look at the "Flash Video" and "HTML5 Video" bars in the original chart. The
blue IE bars are roughly half the size of the green Chrome bars, which might
lead you to believe that IE only consumes roughly half of the energy that
Chrome consumes in those tests. But as the numbers show, the difference isn't
nearly that great.

Starting the Y-axis at 18 watts only serves to make IE's advantage over the
other browsers look greater than it actually is.

~~~
wtallis
The y-axis should have kept the baselines that the study authors used in their
graphs (14.7W for laptops, 37.8W for desktops), since those starting points
are what gives you the power draw due to the browser. What the Microsoft blog
did by moving the baselines up from there was unethical, but having the chart
show power consumption relative to idle instead of powered down is perfectly
reasonable.

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callumjones
This is probably a crazy suggestion, but TechCrunch may want to think about
filtering the stories they end up publishing.

There's a reason Mashable exists, we don't need another site publishing a
advertisement as a story.

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Zhenya
Prius has the best tire wear - bested the ferrari.

I am not looking to optimize energy usage with a browser; I am looking to
optimize speed and security.

Complete straw man .

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rbanffy
When you are running on batteries, conserving power is certainly worth
optimizing for.

~~~
Zhenya
Oh really? And what OS is IE mostly used on? Let me answer that for you -
Windows. I think there are a lower hanging fruit than browser power
optimization that can save on battery life on a windows powered machine.

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joezhou
Too bad windows isn't that energy efficient...

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WatchDog
I don't think that is really a fair call to make. From the benchmarks I have
seen laptop battery life is generally ranked OSX>Windows>Linux. I think the
OSX advantage can be largely attributed to their total control over
hardware/OS. Some benchmarks:
[http://www.zdnet.com/blog/gadgetreviews/windows-7-vs-snow-
le...](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/gadgetreviews/windows-7-vs-snow-leopard-
benchmark-performance-showdown/8586)
[http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE2N...](http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTE2Njk)

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asadotzler
Anyone got independent verification? What about across a representative sample
of sites and apps? As it stands, this seems too easily cooked to be accepted
at face value.

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iamshs
Here is the study:
[http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/2/0/7204397B-DF32-4...](http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/2/0/7204397B-DF32-4C97-A86C-C06F55000992/FhCSE%20-%20The%20Impact%20of%20Internet%20Browsers%20on%20Computer%20Energy%20Consumption.pdf)

And admittedly it is in detail including sites used and test bed.

The difference in power draw upon firing IE, Mozilla and Chrome is small, but
it is there. In both, flash and bare bones tests. I do not know how big of a
difference it will make on portable computers though.

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lessnonymous
In other news, the material used to cover seats in a BMW has the highest¹
thread-count of all luxury car models.

____

1\. Totally made this up. The point being that nobody chooses a car based on
the thread-count of the material in the seats. And nobody chooses a browser
based on the power draw.

~~~
galaktor
I agree that this is a metric that will hardly matter to anybody IRL. Maybe
when it comes to mobile devices (Surface?) and limited battery life, but I'm
not sure how relevant _that_ even is (I wouldn't think that surfing the web
draws most power on a Surface).

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kevingadd
It's not that hard to optimize for power draw in software if you're willing to
do the work to measure and tune. Lots of simple optimizations can produce huge
gains, whether it's using the correct timer APIs to allow the OS to coalesce
timer events (Raymond Chen wrote a blog post about how this allows the CPU to
stay in sleep mode longer on Windows by serving all timers on say, 1000ms
intervals instead of 999ms/1000ms/1001ms, etc), intentionally clamping your
rendering rate to 30hz instead of 60hz, using hardware vsync instead of trying
to do vsync in software (hardware vsync is often much cheaper because it can
rely on the GPU clock/interrupts instead of busy-waiting or CPU timers), or
simply finding ways to do less unnecessary work.

The interesting thing though is that power draw can run counter to other
goals. Getting the best possible framerate can often mean higher power draw,
even though a higher framerate usually means your code is running 'faster' -
if you go from running on one core to four cores, you are probably increasing
the CPU's power draw (and heat dissipation too, which means more power spent
running the fans). But maybe if running on four cores lets you finish early
enough, you can put the whole app to sleep while you wait for the next vsync,
saving power. Ultimately, you have to test this stuff, then tune, then test
again.

I expect IE's power savings are mostly due to its architecture. IIRC they do a
lot of their isolation via threads instead of processes, which means they can
use much cheaper communication mechanisms between their isolation zones, and
that's going to add up. I expect their rendering architecture for plugins is
also significantly more efficient than NPAPI (though I wonder if it can beat
PPAPI), since they have the ability to more or less dictate how things should
be done, and ActiveX plugins have been using GDI/DirectX for ages,
automatically tapping into hardware surfaces and acceleration. IE9/IE10 also
led the way in terms of fast, pervasive hardware acceleration for browser
rendering - while Firefox and Chrome had HW accel first in certain scenarios,
IE was early to the game when it comes to using hardware to render entire
pages.

P.S. People who say power draw doesn't matter in a browser have obviously
never used a laptop or a cell phone before. Do you think Apple and Google
don't try to optimize power draw on iOS and Android devices?

~~~
wtallis
From the study:

 _"In addition, at the request of Microsoft we set the JavaScript timer
frequency to “conserve power” in the Windows power options. We found, however,
that the default Javascript time frequency for all computers tested was set to
“maximum performance.” We did not investigate the impact of this setting upon
browser power draw."_

So yeah, IE got some optimization applied, and unfairly so, since the other
browsers were run with default settings.

~~~
iamshs
No, default power settings on a laptop do that, if it is put in a power saving
or Balanced mode. It is not a specific IE option, but Windows OS option.

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herf
This is a very important benchmark, provided framerates and rendering quality
are held mostly the same. It could easily grow to include cases like having
100 tabs open, which currently don't really appear in any benchmarks.

For almost all my devices, this is the one I care about most.

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AnthonyMouse
Amdahl's law. You can get the browser itself down to nothing and it's totally
futile because as soon as you open a page Flash Player will still peg the CPU.

~~~
wtallis
They did test playing videos through both Flash and HTML5, and found that
power draw _still_ varied significantly depending on browser, with IE drawing
30-40% less power than Chrome (after subtracting out at-desktop idle power).
So there's definitely still low-hanging fruit for the browser itself.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Playing video isn't the thing that causes Flash Player to be a CPU suck. The
video playing is the responsibility of the video codec, which itself is
probably using the GPU. You can play HD video on a Pentium 4, and if you
notice in the tests the CPU consumption for Flash Player playing video wasn't
preposterously higher than it was for HTML5, which is obviously
uncharacteristic of Flash Player's normal behavior.

The problem with Flash Player is that people create busy loops in
ActionScript, especially in ads. You open a dozen tabs, one of them has one of
these ads, your CPU is pegged. If you're worried about "browser power
consumption" and your first step is not to shoot Flash Player in the head,
you're doing it wrong.

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mtowle
How could anyone possibly care about such a thing?

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jervisfm
If you're running Windows on a laptop, the argument here is that using IE as
the browser will make your laptop last longer on a charge than other competing
browsers.

The graph linked[1] does not show that much of a difference between different
browsers - the difference appears exaggerated because the scale on the Y-axis
does not start at zero. Thus, it is very likely that whatever power saving
that you will derive are negligible and don't make a difference in the grand
scheme of things.

[1] -
[http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/browser_...](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/browser_energy.png)

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actionscripted
Is this really the best their marketing department can come up with? "Use IE
and it's like planing millions of trees!"

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cpdean
I wonder how much more efficient text-based browsers are?

Unfortunately Lynx doesn't support html5 video.

~~~
wtallis
I doubt that text-based browsers have been very good about incorporating the
latest advancements in JavaScript engines, so they could easily lose there.

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Dylan16807
So this is with one tab? Okay, how does it perform with 20? How does it
perform vs. noscript?

~~~
iamshs
it looks like it was with 3 tabs open. It obviously needs more testing since
the difference between three browsers is small. The study can be easily
replicated, as the procedure is mentioned in detail in the study's pdf.

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bigd
sounds to me like "Internet Explorer is the most energy efficient umbrella".

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mark-r
Yup, that's the first thing I look for in a browser - energy efficiency.

~~~
iamshs
In portable computing, it can help battery last longer. Just because it is not
user facing, does not mean it should be ignored by engineers.

~~~
cpdean
As soon as microsoft tries to release an IEbook to compete with the Chomebook,
this metric will have a greater impact on battery life.

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lifeguard
I bet this will change after a few patches are applied.

~~~
cpdean
This would make for an interesting performance metric to track over time in
lots of software.

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eksith
Too bad every time I start it, "Your browsing session closed unexpectedly".
For once I expect it to close expectedly, when I click on the bloody 'X'.

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pistacchioso
if you can't beat them with performance and features, go the green way,

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Pitarou
Can someone explain to me why Microsoft is still fighting this battle?

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emperorcezar
Momentum? An organization as large as MS, a project can go on indefinitely
because there is a ton of money to back it up. Something as big as IE would
probably take the CEO to cancel it.

I think it would be more likely they would use one of the OSS engines out
there and rebuild IE on top of a fork.

