Windows 7: IE8 beats Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari in battery

When you think about benchmarking a browser, you typically consider speed, as well as CPU and memory usage. What about battery life, though? Laptop sales are outpacing desktop sales after all, so it only makes sense to choose software based on battery life, in addition to other factors and criteria. AnandTech tested a Gateway laptop with an AMD processor, a Gateway laptop with an AMD processor, and the Asus Eee PC netbook to compare battery life while running Internet Explorer 8, Firefox + AdBlock, Chrome 2, Firefox 3.5.2., Opera 9.64, Opera 10.0b3, and Safari 4. The two Gateways were running Windows Vista, while the Eee PC was running Windows XP SP3. Simple webpages were tested, as well as ones with Flash.



Overall, IE8 performed the best. Here are the test results:



Above are the results when using an AMD processor; IE8 wins. See page three to see the results when using an Intel processor (IE8 wins again) and page four for the netbook results (Chrome 2 comes out on top, while IE8 takes second).

Here's the conclusion of the report:

Overall, Internet Explorer and Firefox + AdBlock consistently place near the top, with Chrome following closely behind. Opera 10 Beta 3 didn't do as well as Opera 9.6.4, and in a couple quick tests, it doesn't appear that the final release of Opera 10 changes the situation at all. Opera in general — version 9 or 10 — looks like it doesn't do as well as the other major browsers. Safari is at the back, by a large margin, on all three test notebooks. We suspect that Safari 4 does better under OS X, however, so the poor Windows result probably won't matter to most Safari users.
Based on these results, we can see that if you use your laptop primarily for Web browsing, you can save precious minutes on your how long you can use your computer. Battery life is, however, just one factor. We have to wonder how the results would look if browsers were tested for efficiency: which browser could display the most complete webpages before the battery ran out?

That's really cool, I'm actually trying to download IE8 right now but you seem to have to pay for this software?

IE8 is free.

so it only makes sense to choose software based on battery life, in addition to other factors and criteria.

i was doing some testing myself last night with ie8(32bit) and firefox 3.5.3 (my default browser) on speedtest.net and i ran test after test immidiately swapping from browser to browser as soon as one would finish, but every time i done the test in ie8 after firefox finished, ie8 would be around 800kbyte/s, as soon as ie8 would finish i flip back to firefox run the test and i was getting double+ of whatever ie8 would get. i done this test for about 30mins with the same results over and over again. i tried altering settings in ie8 to attemp to improve the connection but still no improvement, firefox just kept slaughtering ie8 connection speeds.

i know its a bit off subject as you are comparing battery life but maybe this could be something to do with why ie8 has the least battery consumption, it uses less bandwidth than you actually have? and yes i realize it depends on the time (traffic) but the tests were done exactly one after another like i stated above, on the same website, in the same conditions, both browsers only had 1 tab open ect.

this was my best result in Fox 3.5.3
Attachment 28077

nice comparison though, but i will stick with my orange fox on any system.