Need the Most Life from Your Laptop’s Battery? Use IE, Not Chrome

We regularly test the four most popular browsers for speed, but what about laptop battery life? If you're on a laptop, an extra 20 minutes can make a pretty big difference. Weblog 7Tutorials did a battery life test of each browser, and found that Internet Explorer was the most likely to give you a noticeable battery boost.
They used the Peacekeeper battery test on Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera, on a clean install of Windows 7 using the Power Saver power plan, and run three times to get an average for each browser. Internet Explorer 9 came out ahead, providing 104 minutes of ibm thinkpad t40 laptop battery life in the Peacekeeper test, with Opera not far behind at 100 minutes. Firefox lagged behind a bit at 92 minutes, while Chrome got almost 20 minutes less, lasting only 85 minutes.
Obviously, your mileage may vary on this, but it's a good thing to know if you're in a bind and need to squeeze every ounce of Acer Aspire 3000 battery from your laptop. Hit the link to read more about their methodology and the results.

mcheung05

The problem is that if you use IE, you'll inevitably end up chucking your laptop across the room in frustration and your laptop batteries will be destroyed.
(just kidding IE9 really isn't that terrible)
(Edit comment)

dagwud

It isn't "using IE" that's really the problem. It's "coding so that IE shows something at least close to what you originally had in mind and looks perfect in Firefox and Chrome." (Edit comment)

promoted by Bilbo Baggins

Bilbo Baggins

I just dislike the reverse: devs that code sites for IE and a watered down version for your Chrome/Firefox. I'm looking at you, Juno Web Mail and Microsoft Outlook Web Access. (Edit comment)

mmceorange

OWA works great for me in Chrome, I use it all the time. I also use sharepoint for work, for which IE tab extension works pretty well (Edit comment)

promoted by Bilbo Baggins

-ЯΞ√ΩℒⓊṮ↑☼א$

Really, now, IE9 seems to do fine on most things I make and test in Firefox. (Though the lack of text-shadow is annoying...) (Edit comment)

Bilbo Baggins

But it forces you to use the light version unless in IE. (Edit comment)

cjgriesmeyer01

Have you used IE9? I've seen more and more websites telling me I need Chrome, Firefox, or Opera to use the site. This absolutely kills me at school, to the point where I used a bypass to restore command prompt function and wrote up some registry code so I could join the administrator workgroup and install Chrome. Not to mention the stupid "compatibility view". Why do I need to turn that on? Why would they not just leave it on all of the time? (Edit comment)

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