Windows 10: Windows 10’s Edge remains the best browser when it comes to power efficiency

WinLatest · Dec 31, 2018

Microsoft has admitted that EdgeHTML rendering engine will be discontinued and the rebuilt Windows 10’s Edge browser will use Chromium source codes. Microsoft’s Edge brand is not going anywhere and the company isn’t planning to give up on its typical Edge marketing push.

The company recently released Windows 10 October 2018 Update (version 1809) and it comes with significant Edge improvements. As expected, the Edge remains the best browser when it comes to power efficiency.

The stats suggest Microsoft Edge is improving in terms of power efficiency as compared to rivals like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

Microsoft’s benchmark puts its browser in a good light but with Edge moving to Chromium, the differences are likely to go lower in future releases.

Microsoft says that the benchmark was performed on multiple Surface Book running Windows 10 October 2018 Update Build 17763. Microsoft used Surface Book with Intel i5-6300U processor clocked at 2.4GHz, 8GB of RAM, and Intel HD Graphics 520.

Microsoft has also shared the technical details of the hardware and software. For example, in tests, the brightness of the Surface Book was set to 50%, the device was connected to a wireless network, and it was running on battery (not plugged).

The cache of Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox were cleared before running the tests.

The company says that the laptops played an HTML5 video in fullscreen until all of them had lost power. Microsoft’s test concludes Edge browser as the winner which can provide up to 24 percent better battery life than Chrome. On the other hand, Edge offers up to 94 percent battery backup over Mozilla Firefox.

The post Windows 10’s Edge remains the best browser when it comes to power efficiency appeared first on Windows Latest

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P4-630 · Jan 10, 2020

Microsoft is developing a built-in ad blocker for its Edge browser

"One of the first browser add-ons many people install to improve their online experience is Adblock Plus or something similar. Until recently, Microsoft Edge's lack of support for add-ons put off a lot of would-be users, but reports from Build 2016 suggest that native ad blocking is on its way to the Internet Explorer successor.

Adblock Plus is coming to Edge, but built-in ad blocking would negate the need for such an add-on. A slide shown off and snapped at a Build presentation shows that the next version of Edge, in response to user feedback, will feature ad blocking capabilities. There's no word on delivery timescale, but the upcoming Windows 10 Anniversary Update would seem a likely candidate.

ZDNet's Ed Bott photographed the slide which shows Microsoft's development roadmap built around feedback from testers. Right at the top of the list is reference to plans to create a plugin and extension store for Edge, but it's entry number four that's more intriguing.

"Build ad blocking features into the browser" is listed as a Feature Request from users. But the good news is that it is not only listed as being "Deliverable 4682811", but as "Targeted for the next version".

This will no doubt come as good news for those who have fallen in love with Edge, but it's not something that will be welcomed by the likes of Adblock Plus. It does seem that, particularly in the mobile arena, there is a move to baking ad blocking into the browser so it makes sense that Microsoft is following the trend. But it is the fact that Edge straddles Windows 10 on the desktop and Windows 10 Mobile that makes this a particularly interesting move.

Keep an eye out for Insider builds in the coming weeks as the feature may be just around the corner."

Forget extensions, built-in ad blocking is coming to Microsoft Edge - [UPDATE... no it's not!]

Brink · Jan 10, 2020

Building a more power efficient browser

Today, Jason Weber shared a post on the Windows Experience Blog demonstrating the power efficiency of Microsoft Edge over other popular browsers on Windows 10. With the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, we are hard at work pushing the envelope further, engineering Microsoft Edge to last even longer with typical workloads.

In this post, I’ll share our approach to the complex problems of battery life and power consumption, and discuss some specific work we’re doing to improve Microsoft Edge’s energy efficiency in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update.

How we measure energy efficiency

Improving energy efficiency starts in a controlled lab environment where we can run repeatable tests. At Microsoft, we have a lab specifically designed for measuring power consumption, where we run the newest builds of Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge. This allows us to see how they perform against different workloads and with different PCs.

Power consumption lab at Microsoft

We measure power consumption across a diverse set of Windows hardware – desktops, laptops, tablets, phones and more. Process architectures, screen sizes, and even physical characteristics like heat dissipation and mechanical fans can have a significant impact on power consumption. It’s important to broadly improve power efficiency for everyone.
Machines such as the below Surface Pro 3 are connected to specialized power monitors which measure instantaneous power consumption down to the milliwatt. As we run different workloads across these machines, we measure exactly how much energy they consume.

Surface Pro 3 instrumented to measure instantaneous power consumption. We test power efficiency on a variety of devices, including Surface Pro 3, Surface Pro 4, and Surface Book.

We also record detailed diagnostic information through Windows Event Tracing, which allows us to understand what was happening in software, and correlate that to the energy consumed by the machine – specifically Microsoft Edge and the website’s HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The lab provides repeatable and immediately actionable results in a controlled environment. This allows us to validate improvements, identify regressions, and ensure that Windows and Microsoft Edge are continuously improving with every code change.

Informing power efficiency through customer telemetry

Our objective is to improve efficiency for users, and it’s important to understand what’s happening in the real-world. The Windows Energy Estimation Engine (E3) is a service running on all battery powered Windows 10 devices which tracks energy usage across hardware, apps, and services. The E3 service provides users with more control over their battery life by informing battery saver recommendations, and aggregated results are used by Microsoft through the Windows telemetry systems to improve the Windows ecosystem.

Many modern Windows computers, such as the Surface family, include specialized hardware designed to measure power consumption. This specialized hardware measurement provides 98% accuracy, compared to system software power measurement which has 85% accuracy, and application software power measurement which has minimal correlation to actual power consumption.

Some of our most important insights come from aggregated data from millions of Windows devices reporting billions of data points around Microsoft Edge’s energy efficiency to Microsoft on a monthly basis. We particularly pay attention to telemetry coming from systems with specialized hardware measurement – you just can’t beat 98% accuracy.

Have you ever wondered how many joules of energy are spent on JavaScript garbage collections every day? Those are the multifaceted questions we consider as we optimize Microsoft Edge for performance, power, memory, and more. With this level of data, the tradeoffs around power become clear and intentional.

With every Windows Insider flight, we compare our power consumption with past flights and released versions of Windows. We use this telemetry to ensure new features and code changes don’t increase our power consumption, and to validate new features designed to improve energy efficiency. Thanks to the Windows Insider Program, we can validate our engineering and ensure Microsoft Edge only improves with every release!

Energy efficiency improvements in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update brings dozens of improvements to power efficiency, informed from analyzing customer telemetry and experiments in our controlled labs. These improvements are built into Microsoft Edge, so you don’t need to change settings or turn on a power saving mode – every Microsoft Edge user will receive these without a compromised experience.

Here are four examples which provide a feel for the type of power optimizations occurring.

1. Background tabs are more efficient

Websites frequently run JavaScript in the background, even once fully loaded and not visible to the user. These sites may be checking for new email, analyzing ad metrics, running animations, or anything really – the web is a diverse place. So, when a user has a lot of background tabs open at once, these tasks add up, causing the CPU to work more than it needs to. This makes the computer slower and consumes unnecessary battery life. We’ve heard feedback from our Insiders telling us that sometimes Microsoft Edge is using more CPU than they expect, and background tabs are frequently the cause.

With the Anniversary Update, Microsoft Edge only executes background JavaScript timers once per second in background tabs. More importantly, these timers are coalesced with other work happening across Windows. Microsoft Edge doesn’t wake up the hardware to perform work. Instead we tag along with other work happening across the system, and then quickly yield, allowing the hardware to enter a low power state.

Savings vary depending on the websites you have open, but we’ve seen energy savings of over 90% in some scenarios.

This balance allows your background tabs to keep connections to servers open, check for mail, play music, run analytics, and whatever else they need to do, and also makes your system faster while saving your battery.

Savings vary depending on the websites you have open, but we’ve seen energy savings of over 90% in some scenarios. As an example, the following charts show CPU improvements with eight popular websites open in background tabs.

CPU usage with eight popular websites open in background tabs.

2. Flash is more efficient

Flash ads are common on the Internet and they can have a high battery cost, primarily through continuous animations which continually consume CPU, GPU and display resources. In the Anniversary Update, Flash is now running inside a separate process, and controls which aren’t central to the page are paused by default. Users who want to interact with Flash can simply click the control.

And given Flash is now running in a separate process, we can monitor and control the resource impact of Flash. When Flash consumes too many resources or crashes, we can stop the Flash process without impacting the website.

3. Microsoft Edge’s user interface is more efficient

The Microsoft Edge user interface has been optimized for power efficiency. Animations are an important part of the Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge design language, but animations can consume considerable power if they perform more work than necessary.

For example, the reading mode button animation has been redesigned around power efficiency.

The reading mode button was previously composed of 120 frames. Each time we updated the frame, we caused an expensive XAML layout and visual update. Here we can see the GPU cost for this one animation

GPU cost of the Reading Mode animation

We have improved this in several ways.

The animation had identical frames at the beginning and end of each loop, so progressing frames didn’t always result in visible changes. Optimizing this removed 40% of the frames.

We replaced the traditional XAML animation with a timed GPU transform, and now animate the contents through a viewport – relying entirely on the GPU to perform the work.

These coupled with other optimized have reduced the GPU cost by nearly 75%, the CPU cost by 100%, and reduced the power impact to near zero.

Here’s the GPU cost of this animation with the Anniversary Update:

GPU cost of the Reading Mode animation in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update

That looks much better! We’re applying this level of optimization across our user interface, because every milliwatt counts.

4. Windows networking is more efficient

Microsoft Edge builds on the Windows platform, and benefits from power optimizations throughout Windows. The Windows 10 Anniversary update delivers a range of networking improvements which improve performance and efficiency, while reducing power consumption.

The new TCP Fast Open (TFO) feature allows connections between the device and the server to be setup faster with fewer messages. And the TCP stack now includes an optimized Initial Congestion Window (ICW) with a larger maximum message size, meaning fewer messages have to be exchanged with the server. Fewer messages means the wifi antenna can be turned off sooner, saving energy.

We’ve also added features called Tail Loss Probe (TLP) and Recent Acknowledgement (RACK) which reduce the time required to correct for lost packets. If it’s likely that a message is going to time out, we send a request for the data again sooner than the normal timeout. Doing this allows us to switch off the wifi antenna sooner when you have a poor connection.

What’s next?

Are we done? Absolutely not! When it comes to energy efficiency, we’re never really done, and you’ll continue to see this level of investment over the coming releases. You can preview these improvements today in the Windows Insider Program, and we look forward to bringing them to everyone with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update this summer.

Brandon Heenan
Program Manager, Microsoft Edge
Click to expand...

Source: Building a more power efficient browser | Microsoft Edge Dev Blog

Brink · Jan 10, 2020

Windows 10 browser efficiency comparison with Microsoft Edge

Browser efficiency comparison - Fullscreen Video

Windows 10 October 2018 Update

Methodology summary

The Microsoft Edge team measured the time it took identical Surface Book laptops to run fully through their batteries while streaming HTML5 video in fullscreen.
The test was done with Windows build 17763 and connected to the Internet through Wifi, and multiple samples were taken.

Results

On average, Microsoft Edge lasted 24% longer than Chrome.
On average, Microsoft Edge lasted 94% longer than Firefox.

Methodology details

Computer setup

The test was performed on separate Surface Book laptops running the Windows 10 October 2018 Update (17763 release). A sample was taken for each browser on each laptop. These computers were configured to the following settings, to increase consistency between measures and reduce tasks that may start during the measurement and interfere with the results, while still representing a realistic user setup:

Display brightness was set to 50%

Volume was set to mute

Location was disabled

Bluetooth was disabled

Quiet hours were enabled

Updates were temporarily disabled

Device was connected to a wireless network

Ambient light sensor was disabled

Defender was running normally and up to date

Device was physically unplugged and running on battery

Windows Battery Saver mode was set to activate at 20% battery

Windows Update was temporarily disabled

The cache was cleared on each browser

In order to collect precise power usage data, the Maxim power driver was installed onto each machine.

Hardware

[table][tr][td]Processor[/td] [td]i5-6300U @ 2.4GHz[/td] [/tr] [tr][td]Memory[/td] [td]8G[/td] [/tr] [tr][td]Graphics[/td] [td]Intel HD Graphics 520[/td] [/tr] [/table]

Running the test

The laptops were allowed to play video until all of them had lost power. After the power had run down and the laptops had shut off, power was restored. Run-time and power consumption data was then collected by running "powercfg /spr" and opening the generated report.

Result Details

Summary

[table][tr]Browser Duration Edge Advantage [/tr] [tr][td]Edge 18[/td] [td]16:02:50[/td] [td][/td] [/tr] [tr][td]Chrome 69[/td] [td]12:53:41[/td] [td]Edge lasts 24% longer[/td] [/tr] [tr][td]Firefox 63[/td] [td]8:16:20[/td] [td]Edge lasts 94% longer[/td] [/tr] [/table]
Click to expand...

Source: Browser efficiency comparison - Fullscreen Video

Windows 10: Windows 10’s Edge remains the best browser when it comes to power efficiency

Windows 10’s Edge remains the best browser when it comes to power efficiency

Windows 10’s Edge remains the best browser when it comes to power efficiency

Windows 10’s Edge remains the best browser when it comes to power efficiency

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Windows 10 browser efficiency comparison with Microsoft Edge

Building a more power efficient browser

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