Microsoft may have already surrendered the browser market to Google with the switch to the Chrome engine, but the company still believes Edge has the competition beat.
At least, in certain areas.
The big switch took many by surprise, with some seeing it as an admission from Redmond that EdgeHTML is a failure. No matter which side of the fence you are on, this change to the Chromium engine is what may help the company gain a bigger slice of the pie in the near future.
This change, as well as other improvements and enhancements that Microsoft rolls out for Edge now that it is free of the shackles of biannual updates with every major new Windows 10 version.
Sure, this mean that the software giant can no longer go with its typical Edge marketing push, and will need to highlight any and everything that puts its browser in a good light.
One such notion is how much Microsoft Edge is improving in terms of power efficiency compared to its rivals in the browser space.
Particularly, now that the October 2018 Update is up for grabs.
To that end, the company has done just that — though with a different approach this time.
Instead of publicly talking about how good Edge is, the company has published the results on GitHub. In other words, this is a place that is very likely to be missed by most users and only developers that frequent the website will find out the details.
Getting down to statistics, this new test is not too different than the previous power efficiency tests that Microsoft conducted in the years gone by.
It basically involves running an HTML5 video full-screen on a Surface Book with predefined configuration settings like display brightness set to 50% and volume set to mute. The same settings were used in all tests on all browsers.
And, well, Microsoft Edge won it convincingly, offering 16 hours of video playback, versus 13 hours by Google Chrome.
What does this mean for users, you ask?
With Microsoft moving to Chromium, the difference will pretty much go away. Power efficiency will then come down to how much Redmond manages to optimize its browser on the outside.
Oh well, you win some, you lose some. Right?
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