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Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

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Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#151

Post by Aelinsaar »

admax88q wrote: post #107
tgb wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what opera just did!

That's also what Microsoft did. It's quite possible that both results are valid. It sounds like there's big difference in the sites that Microsoft visited compared to Opera. It seems an even better methodology would be to record actual user browsing sessions, and then replay them through different browsers and measure power consumption. Opera's simulated browsing session does not sound particularly sophisticated IMO.

Couldn't you just make a giant virtual "browsing session" with hundreds of thousands of different sites , and crunch the numbers to minimize the background noise? MS has the computing power, that's for sure.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#152

Post by Retric »

bialpio wrote: post #150
Retric wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-relat…

You can also cache intermediate results from calculations, the idea is don't fetch things you don't need. And as you know the result from fetching an add is going to be blank you don't need to fetch it. Much like a screen reader not downloading a JPEG.

As to downloading you can try it you self your talking fractions of a watt savings from not downloading a few Meg's.

In terms of other downloads from a page, most of that is things like tiny images which you can mostly skip. The Amazon homepage sends lots of junk but all you actually care about is the search bar and links to other areas.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#153

Post by megablast »

KirinDave wrote: post #113
cronjobber wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they also release statistics based on Windows 10 telemetry showing that Edge has better battery life It's such a pity I don't use Microsoft Windows 10 , because I'd be so thrilled to know that through the magic of telemetry , everything I do on a Microsoft Windows 10 enabled computer could help Microsoft win some crucial PR battles.

As opposed to your Apple iPhone where through the magic of telemetry every app is dumping your every finger motion into services like Mixpanel and Kahuna for later analysis. For clarity, they captured the extremely detailed telemetry from their test devices . Most of the telemetry that Microsoft ships back to the mothership is the exact kind of telemetry that apps from the Apple Store, iOS Store, Android Store and Ch…

> As opposed to your Apple iPhone where through the magic of telemetry every app is dumping your every finger motion into services like Mixpanel and Kahuna for later analysis.

This is not true at all. And there is a difference between your smartphone and your laptop, even if you can't see it.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#154

Post by [deleted] »

bialpio wrote: post #150
Retric wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-relat…

[deleted]

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#155

Post by bialpio »

Retric wrote: post #152
bialpio wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-relat…

You can also cache intermediate results from calculations, the idea is don't fetch things you don't need. And as you know the result from fetching an add is going to be blank you don't need to fetch it. Much like a screen reader not downloading a JPEG. As to downloading you can try it you self your talking fractions of a watt savings from not downloading a few Meg's. In terms of other downloads from a page, most of t…

But how is it all relevant to the discussion? Bottom line is that using adblock in one browser and not using it in other browser makes the comparisons meaningless...

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#157

Post by XCSme »

yitchelle wrote: post #126

Coming from the embedded world, I have always concern about CPU loading which translates to how much power you are sucking. I can't not understand why minimal CPU load is not on top of design requirement of many software products, totally ignored if on a desktop system.

Because PC Master Race. We only want 300FPS+ and 4k graphics, we don't care about $5 extra to our electricity bill, so why would software developers even bother with this and spend extra time and money for improving power drain?

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#158

Post by bzbarsky »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #53
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.

> To be fair to both sides, this is a really hard thing to measure. Is it though? It's more the fact that Big Data is totally useless because it contains thousands of uncontrolled variables that confound the results. If you really want to know which browser is more power efficient, get a sample of the commonly visited sites and then visit the same sites on the same common devices in different browsers and see which o…

Except that this has an interesting failure mode: unless you're visiting the sites by hand you're presumably using some browser automation framework, with different implementations for different browsers. And _those_ can have nontrivial power usage, depending on how they work. I know for a fact some of them do power-hungry continuous polling...

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#159

Post by jsmith0295 »

caconym_ wrote: post #131
j_h_s wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that if you're running on the same device, the gpu should not be a variable.

IIRC everything except Edge and Safari are forced to use Silverlight for Netflix streaming. I'm not exactly sure why this is, but it probably has something to do with the mess that is video codec licensing.

It's for DRM purposes

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#160

Post by matmann2001 »

harigov wrote: post #81
matmann2001 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The fact that they spent so much money in hardware to test the battery usage and the amount of effort they put in to improve doesn't seem to imply that this was just a PR stunt.

You underestimate the value attributed to PR by large corporations.
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