
Microsoft Edge now gets even more out of your battery - technological
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/09/15/edge-battery-anniversary-update/#STjfqEM1ZhdkQ3Xr.97
======
yodon
I'm a huge fan of Microsoft, heavy Azure and .NET stack user, and I can't find
a single nice thing to say about Edge. Yes, it crashes constantly, but it's
the easy stuff that is hopelessly and inexcusably broken.

Want a dozen tabs? No problem, just don't expect to be able to switch to the
ones on the right because the hit boxes for selecting the tabs are hidden
behind the hit box for minimizing the window. Want to resize the window? No
problem, just don't try to do it by clicking on the top edge of the window
because the hit box for resizing the window is hidden behind the hit boxes for
selecting tabs. Want to set the default search engine to google or anything
else? No problem, just don't expect to search for anything with a dot in the
name because the unbelievably poorly written regex for detecting URLs
overrides the search engine behavior in the address bar, preventing your
search from hitting the search engine.

The list of unbelievable simple, horribly frustrating usability issues is so
long and so easy to encounter, I refuse to believe anyone on the Edge team
actually uses this thing.

Oh and it crashes constantly. Did I mention that it crashes constantly? Which
is a shame because In my opinion it has the nicest developer toolset of any of
the major browsers.

~~~
RandomOpinion
>Oh and it crashes constantly. Did I mention that it crashes constantly?

Slightly tangential but do you have your MS telemetry turned off? If you do,
MS doesn't know you're having a problem.

Those who don't vote, don't get to complain about the problems caused by not
voting.

~~~
digler999
> Those who don't vote, don't get to complain about the problems caused by not
> voting.

Nice dichotomy there: privacy or quality. And people wonder why MS gets such a
bad name.

What about their "walled garden" philosophy ? All tablets/laptops are one-
size-fits all, only a handful of total models exist. All MS "updates" are
shoved down the users' throats. There should be no need for telemetry to
detect a bad user experience. The apps are all signed, binary blobs that run
in their own private, signed environment. Unless MS has no QA department, they
absolutely are aware of how crappy their browser runs.

~~~
Sylos
I'm pretty sure that Microsoft actually does not have a QA department.

I can't seem to find a source which confirms specifically that, but after
Nadella took over in 2014, he cut a bunch of jobs, which were mostly jobs from
the Nokia acquisition, but he also specifically mentioned in this context that
he wanted to go more into the direction of agile software development, which
means no dedicated QA and rather the developers are supposed to test it as
they build it.

Source for that statement is in this article under "Cloud Methods", second
paragraph:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-15/microsoft...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-15/microsoft-
said-to-announce-job-cuts-as-soon-as-this-week)

------
izacus
Hopefully this pushes Chrome team to improve the terrible battery management
across the board. Even on OS X, Chrome eats battery significantly faster than
Safari.

Which is becoming a larger and larger problem as apps are switching away from
tiny efficient native runtimes to the Chromium driven Electron hogs :/

~~~
masklinn
> Hopefully this pushes Chrome team to improve the terrible battery management
> across the board. Even on OS X, Chrome eats battery significantly faster
> than Safari.

Why would this push them any more than Safari blowing them out the water on
efficiency for _years_?

~~~
daenney
Because no one really cares about doing better than Safari, mostly because the
amount of users is small and they all consider themselves better browsers.
Apple or even Webkit never made any kind of waves about it themselves either.

However, Microsoft is pretty big. Edge is the default browser on Windows, a
platform that has a significant amount of users, and they're making quite some
noise in the area. Others have taken notice and are at least ensuring they
keep up. Which is good, we all benefit.

------
cwyers
So, I'm glad that Microsoft is focusing on a real-world pain point for people
on Edge. I don't think people can be talked into switching browsers by stuff
like the Cortana integration, but this might convince some. One problem is
that Edge really isn't quite ready for primetime yet. There's a few sharp
edges here and there that make using it about 90% pleasant enough and 10%
really painful. Some of it is that I don't think the UWP is as fully-baked as
the old Win32 ecosystem yet, and it makes weird compromises. The multitasking
model of UWP seems to be phone-first, which is just out of place for me. When
I have a desktop PC that's plugged in and has 16gb of RAM, my web browser
should never just spontaneously CLOSE because I tab out to another window. I
get why Edge does this, believe me. (I just got out of a two-week stretch of
using a cheap Nokia Lumia as my smartphone because of problems with my main
device overheating, and there's such a tension between being impressed at what
Windows 10 for Phones or whatever the hell they're calling it now can do in
512mb of RAM and thinking that 512mb of RAM is incredibly frustrating to live
with.) But it doesn't make sense on the majority of devices that Edge runs on.
Leave my browser window open. I'm going to come back to it. Also, Microsoft
really needs to break the link between Edge updates and Windows updates. This
doesn't affect me much at home because I'm Fast Ring so I get Windows updates
more often than I eat meals sometimes, but in general I don't think it's great
for the ecosystem.

Also, if by any chance someone working on Edge is reading this thread, can you
make it so I can resize the text box for adding comments to Hacker News?
Chrome lets me do this, and I would probably increase my Edge usage
significantly with just that fix.

~~~
coldpie
> The multitasking model of UWP seems to be phone-first, which is just out of
> place for me. When I have a desktop PC that's plugged in and has 16gb of
> RAM, my web browser should never just spontaneously CLOSE because I tab out
> to another window.

I haven't used Windows in a decade. This really happens? UWP programs just
spontaneously close on desktop computers? I really can't believe that.

~~~
contextfree
I guess there are a couple things this could refer to -

* On desktop Windows in desktop mode, modern apps are suspended when they're minimized or the user switches away from the virtual desktop they're on. Background operations that need to meant to continue are supposed to use various officially supported background task APIs. This is intended to be transparent to the user.

* AIUI in situations where the OS detects an app is hung and would put up a ghost window with a "not responding" message if it were a classic app, the OS will just straight up kill a modern app. The theory is that this will force developers to make more responsive apps.

So AFAIK there are no situations where a "well-behaved" app is supposed to
spontaneously close from the user's POV, but for modern apps the OS is
stricter about trying to enforce "good behavior". TBH though I think what the
GP was seeing was probably just Edge crashing on its own.

------
oz
At home when I'm all plugged in, I have 3 Chrome windows, each with multiple
tabs, spread across my PLP setup. Whenever I pop into a client, and awake from
sleep, you can almost see the battery draining in real time. Edge to the
rescue; and I'm glad they're putting the pressure on Google to do better.

Pro Tip: You think Edge saves your battery? Sheeeeit....Try using the Movies &
TV app vs VLC someday. M&TV is a certified power miser - I caught up on
several TV shows plus The Martian on a flight from Montego Bay to Frankfurt a
few months ago, using my Toshiba Encore 10" tablet that isn't exactly known
for its battery life.

------
muizelaar
Unfortunately, Netflix uses DRM which limits Firefox's ability to have control
over the better usage in this test. The video decoding and decryption is done
by the Adobe CDM. It would be interesting to see a comparison without DRM'd
video.

~~~
gcp
Exactly! It's even worse because Netflix has specific deals with
Microsoft/Edge that use a different DRM technique - they announced so publicly
as a reason to restrict Chrome and Firefox to non-HD video.

------
SmallDeadGuy
> To validate our improvements and make sure we’re giving our customers the
> best experience possible, we monitor aggregated telemetry on power
> consumption from millions of Windows 10 devices around the world.

I don't know how I feel about this. On the one hand, the telemetry data is
obviously very useful and will allow products to be improved greatly. On the
other hand, how many of the "millions" of people know the data is being
collected? Did every single one of them click a button that said "I know what
data you want to collect and I accept your request to take it"? Definitely
not. To pull stunts like this, they need absolute transparency on the
telemetry collected, the encryption/sanitation methods, how they ensure
anonymity, the security of the protocols used for collection, and ideally be
an opt-in not an opt-out. I don't care if they collect battery usage of my new
laptop playing games, and anything important is disabled, but there's
absolutely no way I'm upgrading my development PC to Windows 10 or ever
installing a Microsoft product on my Linux install.

I'm waiting for the inevitable day when Windows messes with other OSes that
have been dual-booted. One day we'll log in and see a pop-up saying "We've
detected you recently installed <Insert Linux Distro here> to <Insert Disk
Drive here>! To provide the best service possible, we've installed a full
Microsoft driver/software suite and changed the theme to something more
Windows-like."

Edit: As a fun side-note, when copying the quote to my clipboard it
automatically appended "Read more at <link to article here." The joke about
Microsoft pushing their products into Linux distros was exactly that: A joke.
But secretly adding data (even harmless links) into local memory that could be
unknowingly stored/put anywhere because the user has no idea is unbelievable.

------
pooper
I run a virtual box VM provided by Microsoft to test my website on their new
browser. It surprises me how much of a resource hog Windows can be... Is there
really no way to turn off cortana and on access antivirus scan? I guess it is
probably fine on a real machine but it sucks on a VM on a machine with a
spinning disk where Windows is just a tenant among others.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
> Is there really no way to turn off cortana and on access antivirus scan?

Cortana is a new name for an old process. It is SearchUI.exe. You can disable
most of Cortana's functionality, it is currently "suspended" on my machine and
using 38 MB of RAM, with 5 seconds of CPU time. Pretty low utilisation.

Here is a guide to disabling the anti-virus indefinitely:

[http://www.ghacks.net/2015/10/25/how-to-disable-windows-
defe...](http://www.ghacks.net/2015/10/25/how-to-disable-windows-defender-in-
windows-10-permanently/)

------
michaelcampbell
Given that what's IN my battery is "power", that title could be taken in
completely the opposite direction it's intended.

------
beezischillin
sometimes I do wonder why Microsoft fanbois creep around in comment sections,
downvoting everyone who doesn't fall to the ground at the amazing (not)
quality of work Microsoft does

------
bla2
It's really cool that they published details on their measurement methodology
and even made their webdriver code open-source
([https://microsoftedge.github.io/videotest/2016-09/WebdriverM...](https://microsoftedge.github.io/videotest/2016-09/WebdriverMethodology.html)).
Also cool that Chrome's energy use has been improving considerably in Chrome
53, and with this being a bit of a PR battle here's hoping that energy use of
both Edge and Chrome continues to improve.

------
extrapickles
They must have carefully curated the "general browsing" to sites that do not
cause it to crash, as it always seems to pull a vanishing act if the site
isn't coded specifically to avoid known crash points.

The most reliable way I've found to crash it is to use MutationObservers in a
website. Even though Edge has support for them, I still have to pave over it
with a JS version that doesn't cause the browser to crash after a few minutes
of use.

Something is wrong if emulating browser features in JS leads to a better
experience than using the feature as built in. Having to do so probably
eliminates any battery life gains they have made.

------
consto
Now this is a competition I can get behind.

------
gnicholas
Also super slow for JS. 1/5 the speed of Chrome working with our JS, which
makes a huge difference in terms of usability and responsiveness.

Hope this new version is faster, but if it's optimizing for battery life then
maybe it'll be worse...

------
walter_bishop
How does Microsoft tweaking the OS to make Edge use the battery more
efficiently translate to industry-leading efficiency? A more reliable test
would be to compare browsers on another Operating System.

------
andrewvijay
I don't use edge until now the only reason being no support for extensions.
Since they are arriving soon it's very exciting. Finally to save some more
hours on the battery!

~~~
omaranto
Not "arriving soon", but rather "arrived very recently". I got them with the
anniversary update.

~~~
andrewvijay
Oops gotta update

------
amadeusw
Since now Edge has the extensions now, I'll switching before upgrading
hardware. I want to see how much longer my old battery would last.

~~~
V-2
Mine doesn't. They're part of an update that won't reach everyone until
November.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
It's pretty easy to get the update manually if you want it. Search for
Microsoft's "Media Creation Tool" and run it. It'll offer to upgrade the PC
you're on immediately, or download the installation media.

~~~
MLR
Alternately you can use the tool on this page, I think it skips some of the
messing about you get with the other methods.

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-
download/windows10](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-
download/windows10)

------
anjc
I love Edge (and loved IE Metro). It's ideal for a device like the Surface.

------
tbrock
What about vs Safari? That's the real gold standard for battery life.

~~~
0xFFC
That would be unfair comparison in this case, because they are talking about
browser vs browser comparison.But for safari , since neither support others
platform, that would be whole stack vs whole stack.

~~~
Spivak
Sure, it might be an unfair comparison, but the results will be far more
meaningful to the end user.

Take a Macbook Pro / Surface Pro 4 with stock settings, put Edge / Safari
under the same paces and see which one uses more energy.

~~~
izacus
You're testing the hardware and software stack then. Those tests are a dime a
dozen.

------
youdontknowtho
I like the text rendering in Edge, but its still pretty rough.

------
pipio21
Thank you Microsoft!

That is what I wanted: Mandated Telemetry in everything I do so the mothership
knows everything I do everytime from a product I supposedly bought.

It is so great to know that today Microsoft and the US gobertment could use
all this information to improve their products or directly control the people
that use their computers.

