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Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

opera.com

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Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#141

Post by hristov »

dewiz wrote: post #129
hristov wrote: post #117

Wow thanks for the moderation! I guess here in Hacker News we are all smart engineers and scientists that rely on the scientific method except for when it comes to microsoft when we all turn into drooling idol worshiping children. I wonder whether MS has a well orchestrated campaign to have multiple employees troll hn, or whether they just go to the source and buy moderation points in bulk from ycombinator.

It's not about the question, it's about the tone ;-)

So I did put in another comment that was in an overwhelmingly positive tone and that one got downvoted as well. And no they have not released the script. So I guess it was not about the tone.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#142

Post by Retric »

bialpio wrote: post #105
Retric wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are testing more or less the same input just producing different output. This was a common strategy where graphics cards for example would degrade image quality for speed when a driver noticed you where running a benchmark. Which is one of the reasons benchmarks are so difficult. PS: A more insidious problem is when you specifically optimize for something because it's a benchmark.

Not neccessarily same input - all depends how adblock works. I assumed that with adblock, my browser will not even send a request to fetch the ads, so I save on network traffic, and the browser will not have to render whatever would have been fetched - this to me is a different input (to the browser's rendering engine) than you would have without adblock. With all this said, "proper-er" benchmark would be to show eac…

Server sends an HTML and browser fetches what it needs. Not fetching content is simply an advanced form of caching.

More importantly even if you grab the content it's rendering that takes power downloading files is very low energy. Even just disabling auto play sound / video is going to save power.

PS: Assumptions about how browsers interact with websites is basically a failure to understand what's going on IMO. Telnet to port 80, send fetch request on a web-server and you will get HTML unless they require HTTPS.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#143

Post by JoBrad »

ebbv wrote: post #24
theseatoms wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't. But there's no reason anyone should be running a browser without an ad-blocker in the first place. Edge should have a lightweight ad-blocker built-in by default.

Considering Microsoft recently added ads to the Windows 10 login screen, I wouldn't hold my breath on Edge coming with an ad blocker out of the box. EDIT: Downvotes? Really this is factually accurate: http://lifehacker.com/windows-10-is-showing-ads-on-your-lock...

The article you linked to specifically talks about how easy it is to turn them off.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#144

Post by JoBrad »

callesgg wrote: post #67

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.

Safari has the same problem that Edge/IE has - it's only on one OS.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#146

Post by Splines »

KirinDave wrote: post #109
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.

> Not to discredit their results, but what it shows is that users who used Edge consumed less power than Chrome or Firefox. The workloads Microsoft simulated were held constant for every platform and instrumented via a common command-and-control testing library. It is very much apples-to-apples. The additional telemetry they released is even more confirmation. Opera replied by enabling a pair of special default-off f…

> The workloads Microsoft simulated were held constant for every platform and instrumented via a common command-and-control testing library. It is very much apples-to-apples.

I'm not doubting this part at all.

> The additional telemetry they released is even more confirmation.

The additional telemetry doesn't really tell much of a story either way, given that it's presented as a single chart and little context is provided. Unfortunately there's no link to the data analysis to understand what factors were considered when looking at the data sets involved.

Personally I've found that it's hard to come to these high-level conclusions about performance from large data sets, because users and their devices are so incredibly diverse. It's really hard to draw definitive conclusions given all the data.

It's dangerous to take your data, aggregate it at a high level and look at the results from that point of view - you lose the context under which it was gathered and can come to the wrong answer (for example, browser X is popular in a country with great internet, so page loads are faster, and browser Y is popular in a country with terrible internet, so page loads are slower).

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#147

Post by hristov »

chc wrote: post #132
hristov wrote: post #117

Wow thanks for the moderation! I guess here in Hacker News we are all smart engineers and scientists that rely on the scientific method except for when it comes to microsoft when we all turn into drooling idol worshiping children. I wonder whether MS has a well orchestrated campaign to have multiple employees troll hn, or whether they just go to the source and buy moderation points in bulk from ycombinator.

If you really think Microsoft cares so much what score your comments get on HN that they are paying people to downvote you, you need to take a deep breath and regain some objectivity. Your comment was downvoted because it was rude and confrontational. People post things on HN all the time that criticize Microsoft without getting downvoted — because they do it without antagonizing other HN users.

I think my comment was not rude but merely common sense. If I see a commercial for laundry detergent on TV and they compare their product with another laundry detergent, the company doing the advertising will surely have a description of the exact method of testing they used. I am not sure why microsoft should be held to a lower standard.

Anyways, to perform my own little test, I re-wrote my post in an overwhelmingly nice way, and still got downvoted. So, no, it does not seem that the comment was downvoted for being rude.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#148

Post by bwat48 »

sp332 wrote: post #37
guroot wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with the ad blocker being a feature in opera out of the box? They were trying to show that opera can achieve better battery performance based on it's features and optimizations. Does that not include the ad-blocker?

It's not on by default though.

Their power saver isn't on by default either

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#149

Post by hristov »

hristov wrote: post #141
dewiz wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about the question, it's about the tone ;-)

So I did put in another comment that was in an overwhelmingly positive tone and that one got downvoted as well. And no they have not released the script. So I guess it was not about the tone.

And of course couple of minutes after I made my point about my second comment being downvoted, the downvotes were reversed and that comment was upvoted instead.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#150

Post by bialpio »

Retric wrote: post #142
bialpio wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not neccessarily same input - all depends how adblock works. I assumed that with adblock, my browser will not even send a request to fetch the ads, so I save on network traffic, and the browser will not have to render whatever would have been fetched - this to me is a different input (to the browser's rendering engine) than you would have without adblock. With all this said, "proper-er" benchmark would be to show eac…

Server sends an HTML and browser fetches what it needs. Not fetching content is simply an advanced form of caching. More importantly even if you grab the content it's rendering that takes power downloading files is very low energy. Even just disabling auto play sound / video is going to save power. PS: Assumptions about how browsers interact with websites is basically a failure to understand what's going on IMO. Teln…

> Server sends an HTML and browser fetches what it needs. Not fetching content is simply an advanced form of caching.

I didn't understand this part. Caching is basically "not fetching content that you already have", and I don't see how it is relevant here. I assume that when using adblocks the browser will not even issue a request to fetch the data (be it HTML, JavaScript, flash videos, images, etc.) that is ad-related, so it is not the same as caching. And even if it did choose to fetch the data but then skip rendering, it boils down to the same thing: browser engine has different (presumably smaller) input in case when you use adblock.

By telnetting I will get a response, but this is only a first step. HTML will have references to huge amount of other content that also needs to be fetched (unless everything is embedded in the HTML - possible, but unlikely for any bigger website). Open developer tools in any browser and go to network tab and see for yourself how the amount of fetched data (and number of requests / number of fetched files) differs when you use adblock and not. This is the difference in the input for the browser. Opera mentions mlive.com - with uBlock, FF fetches 2.5MB of data (caching disabled), without uBlock I get 5MB (caching disabled). We can even take the example to the extreme - let's go to the website that has only ads. Of course Opera will be better there - it will have to render nothing, everything will be blocked by adblock.

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