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Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

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Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#181

Post by cptskippy »

bialpio wrote: post #97
zeta0134 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I totally missed the part where Opera has the ad blocker turned on by default. Ignore my rambling then; my sleepy brain thought he was talking about two browsers that both had different ad blockers installed.

Not sure if Opera has it on by default - all they say is that it is build-in so that somehow makes it okay to use it and compare apples to oranges :) If I understand both tests correctly, Opera ran with adblock and battery saver enabled (those are apparently not default settings), versus Edge without adblock, on sites which supposedly are ad-heavy - this will bias the results towards browser with adblock enabled.

Exactly, it's like saying your bus with no passengers gets better gas mileage than your competitors bus with 60 passengers.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#183

Post by russjr08 »

tyleregeto wrote: post #161
caconym_ wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Netflix plays fine in Chrome (maybe Firefox too) using HTML5, it was opt-in at one point not sure about now. I watch in Linux all the time, no Silverlight there.

Starting with Firefox 47, it works fine as well (macOS here), but you need to switch your user agent to Chrome (before you go to Netflix). I'm guessing Netflix hasn't updated their compatibility checker.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#184

Post by dang »

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.

Please don't take threads off topic like this, please don't call names, and please don't sling accusations about astroturfing and shillage so lightly. That's a breach of civility here.

If you're genuinely worried about whether HN is being manipulated in this way, you could read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844253, and if you want to know how serious we are about cracking down on abuse when we see it, you could read https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=true&page=0&dateR.... Considering how much work we put into it, I think "buy moderation points in bulk from ycombinator" was in rather bad taste.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11964225 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#185

Post by Aissen »

kylealden wrote: post #91

Edge platform team employee here. A couple thoughts on methodology, focusing on our scripted test (under "stay productive longer" at https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2016/06/20/more-... ), which is most comparable to Opera's test; nobody seems to challenge our Netflix results: * We did not enable ad blockers, because we were testing the efficiency of the network stack, browser rendering pipeline, etc.; if…

> nobody seems to challenge our Netflix results:

Of course, this is Lotus vs Office all over again. You're using the OS advantage (Windows 10 and its DRM platform) to show that you can do things more efficiently.

You chose the technology platform (I'm guessing Play Ready), you forced GPU vendors to comply, and now you give competitors a bad reputation for daring to use their own (or a competitor's) technology.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#186

Post by jcoffland »

csl wrote: post #130
patcheudor wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ding, ding, ding and to be fair this is the problem in both methodologies. The only way to accurately perform this test is to spider a bunch of sites, save the contents to a locally hosted HTTPD and ensure all third-party JS calls are resolved locally and test both against the exact same sites as they were spidered at a point in time. You can simply not account for changes which may happen to the markup, ad network b…

You don't need to go to such complicated lengths. Just perform enough tests (as in, a statistically large enough amount) and a distribution will form. That also captures the variability of real world network effects.

But this is not repeatable.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#187

Post by pfortuny »

mwcampbell wrote: post #39
pfortuny wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope: it is Statephobia and States have no right to honor, just people eith individual bodies.

That seems like splitting hairs to me. Would you want people to reject your software just because of your nationality or that of your company? Probably not. So it seems to me that an implication of the golden rule is that we shouldn't do that.

The fact that I do not like it does not change my opinion.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#188

Post by petre »

After I read this I've installed Opera mobile and it's now my default browser. The ad blocker runs pretty well, along with a customized hosts file mapping advertisers' domains to localhost. Too bad DuckDuckGo is only available as a search engine in Opera Mini beta. Looking forward to get rid of Google search.

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#189

Post by Already__Taken »

ryuuchin wrote: post #163
caconym_ wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chrome uses widevine (DRM) for Netflix which uses HTML5. Really the more significant difference is that Chrome gets capped to 720p. Edge actually gets the 1080p streams (as does IE11 on Windows 8+ and the Netflix Windows Store app).

Seems arbitrary, what's the reasoning for that? Isn't this exactly what everyone warned about with DRM in html5?

Re: Why we challenge Microsoft’s battery test

#190

Post by breakingcups »

csl wrote: post #130
patcheudor wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ding, ding, ding and to be fair this is the problem in both methodologies. The only way to accurately perform this test is to spider a bunch of sites, save the contents to a locally hosted HTTPD and ensure all third-party JS calls are resolved locally and test both against the exact same sites as they were spidered at a point in time. You can simply not account for changes which may happen to the markup, ad network b…

You don't need to go to such complicated lengths. Just perform enough tests (as in, a statistically large enough amount) and a distribution will form. That also captures the variability of real world network effects.

What about different ads served to different browsers? Someone running, say, Opera will have a different ad profile than a Chrome user even when completely blank cookie-wise.
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