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Reducing mobile power consumption has been a top priority of the PC industry for years. Much of the work in this area has focused on hardware, but a recent post from Microsoft's IE blog raises the question of whether or not browser choice can make a difference in battery life.
After some real-world tests, Microsoft has concluded IE9 is the most energy-efficient of the major browsers on the market.
Microsoft compared its new browser with Opera 11, Firefox 4, Chrome 10, and Safari 5 on an Intel laptop, measuring how many watts the machine consumed with the browser idling, showing a news site, and running graphics-intensive Web tests.
The upshot: IE9 is the most efficient in the test, meaning it'll take the smallest toll on the battery.
There's plenty wiggle room in the study. The tests were on Windows 7--but how does Safari fare on a Mac? IE9 has lots of hardware acceleration features that can reduce power consumption--but Firefox 4 and later other browsers offer some hardware acceleration on Windows XP, too. Microsoft's selection of Web sites may not represent the sites where you actually spend time. Different computers have different power consumption and power-saving characteristics. And in the real world, most people run more software than just a browser.
