There's no doubt that your choice of browser can have a noticeable impact on your battery life, and now Microsoft is hoping to leverage that fact to convince you to use Edge. Now that the Windows 10 Creators Update is here, Microsoft has pitted its Edge browser head-to-head with Firefox and Chrome in a battle for battery supremacy, and the results are fairly substantial.
In a test of streaming video from Vimeo at fullscreen until the battery died, Microsoft found that Edge lasted 77% longer than Firefox and 35% longer than Chrome. In hard numbers, Edge made it to the 751 minute mark, while Chrome and Firefox came in at 557 minutes and 424 minutes, respectively.
As part of the setup, Microsoft used three identical Surface Book laptops running on Windows 10 Pro build 15063. You can get a closer look at the full methodology from Microsoft, but a number of features like location and the ambient light sensor were disabled, while the volume was muted and the cache for each browser was cleared.
There's always reason to be skeptical of first-party tests like these, of course. That said, the Creators Update does introduce a range of improvements to Edge, and these results largely echo findings from a similar test conducted last year. Given browser choice is usually driven by many other personal preferences, however, it'll be interesting to see if Microsoft's case for battery efficiency can win over any stalwart Chrome or Firefox users.
