Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test • Hacker News Board

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#61

Post by dangrossman » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 6:29 PM UTC

JTon wrote: post #58

kraftman wrote: post #21

Obviously this is anecdotal but I've been messing around with my laptop a lot recently trying to get to a full day of work on battery, and the best setup I've found is windows 10 Insider with Edge + adblock. Opera battery saver is great but they should enable it automatically whenever you're on battery, as it has no performance impact that I've noticed.

Edge allows extensions now or are you using an OS-level adblock?

Edge allows extensions now.

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensi...

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#62

Post by matmann2001 » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 6:31 PM UTC

dhaivatpandya wrote: post #54

Splines wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to discredit their results, but what it shows is that users who used Edge consumed less power than Chrome or Firefox. Whether that means Edge is more power efficient, or devices where Edge is used more often are more power efficient, or users who select for Edge tend to visit sites that allow Edge to be more power efficient isn't clear. To be fair to both sides, this is a really hard thing to measure.

It seems pretty unlikely that the data wouldn't be normalized by some metric of intensity of use since this is pretty much the first thing anyone would think of. Normalizing even by something as simple as "number of websites visited" would, I imagine, significantly reduce the contribution of such factors to the differences observed.

Or they just ignore normalization, since it's for PR and not an actual scientific study meant to withstand scrutiny.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#63

Post by matmann2001 » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 6:32 PM UTC

darkmuck wrote: post #29

Now that Opera Software is owned by a Chinese company I've avoided their browser anyways, regardless of potential battery/performance benefits.

I recently switched from Opera to Vivaldi and have been pretty happy with it.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#64

Post by matmann2001 » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 6:33 PM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #30

darkmuck wrote: post #29

Now that Opera Software is owned by a Chinese company I've avoided their browser anyways, regardless of potential battery/performance benefits.

Isn't that just xenophobia?

Only if you're Norwegian.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#65

Post by AnthonyMouse » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 6:36 PM UTC

DasIch wrote: post #51

reitanqild wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is impressive I guess given that Firefox users often use extensions of varying quality?

I'm sure there are a lot of Firefox extensions of questionable quality but I would expect that at least the popular ones are of fairly decent quality. I also would assume that only a small minority of users know about and actually use extensions. Even people who do use extensions probably don't really use more than an adblocker.

An extension doesn't have to be popular to be significant. 1% of people accidentally installing some spyware crap that slows down the browser by 50,000% is going to move the needle.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#66

Post by post_break » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 6:41 PM UTC

What really surprised me were the run times of that laptop. Man that is crappy battery life for both instances. My thinkpad T220 with extended battery and 13" Macbook pro both decimate that battery life.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#67

Post by callesgg » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 6:42 PM UTC

I have found that safari gives best battery time on OSX (like 9 hours of use vs 6-7 when on firefox).

But i generally dont use safari as battery time is not the most important factor in my common use cases.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#68

Post by squeaky-clean » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 6:47 PM UTC

coldpie wrote: post #20

lavalampkid wrote: post #8

Definitely not a fair test... Edge was rendering a lot more without an ad-blocker.

Edge is free to implement an ad-blocker, too.

It's supported if you're running a Windows Insider build. Since the Opera test was using a dev channel build, I don't think it's a stretch to say they could have used the insider build of Edge with Adblock or Adblock Plus (uBlock isn't ported yet, but it shouldn't be too hard).

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensi...

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#69

Post by grouchoboy » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 6:54 PM UTC

darkmuck wrote: post #31

mwcampbell wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that just xenophobia?

No, I don't think so. Maybe I'm a bit paranoid but I tend to avoid software from Chinese companies because of all recent stories of a apps stealing/sending data that they don't necessarily need to function. But I suppose software from any country could do the same thing though...

And what is your position about hardware?

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#70

Post by abritinthebay » Thu, Jun 23, 2016, 6:54 PM UTC

Quai wrote: post #15

lavalampkid wrote: post #8

Definitely not a fair test... Edge was rendering a lot more without an ad-blocker.

You might argue that not rendering ads is a valid method to save battery.

and that is true - but enabling the (default disabled) ad-blocking in Opera to test comparable metrics means that Opera, in my eyes, just lost any credibility they had.

Given that even with the ad-blocker it barely beat Edge I'm almost certain they tried it initially and found the result was true so enabled this feature so they could write this fluff piece.