Building a more power-efficient browser

[ams6110]

Honestly I'd be happy if they could stop Windows 10 from turning my laptop into a hair dryer randomly while it is otherwise entirely idle. The thing is sitting there doing nothing, suddenly the fan will start roaring and the CPU utilization spikes.

[martinml]

Apparently Windows 10 likes to use idle time to test the memory:

http://superuser.com/questions/635837/high-cpu-load-from-sys...

In my desktop it was causing it to rev up the fan when it was idle for a few minutes.

[Yhippa]

Seriously why on Earth does this happen? Even if Edge ends up being more power-efficient the rest of the OS (Windows 10) is going to ensure that I will get no more than 3 hours of battery life on my laptop.

[slezyr]

CPU? Never had problems with it.

But it literally rapes my HDD while updating(anytime it wants) or it's AV scanning disk(and you can't turn it off)

It makes my desktops unusable.

[executesorder66]

> The thing is sitting there doing nothing

Doing nothing, except mabye mining a fuckton of data about you and sending it to Microsoft.

[lewisl9029]

Some interesting optimizations in here, but I'm curious about this one in particular:

> 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.

Are there any implications for web techs (maybe like WebTorrent?) that do need to run JS constantly in the background?

[tqkxzugoaupvwqr]

In Safari, which slows background JavaScript down or stops it altogether, music stops playing occasionally on Soundcloud when a song ends. The only option to prevent this is to make the Soundcloud tab the sole tab in the browser window. The window can be in the background but the tab is not treated as background tab because it is the active tab in the window.

[derefr]

I'm not sure about Edge in particular, but on most platform runtimes "timers" are separate from IO-availability-triggered asynchronous events. When a WebRTC data connection signals its send channel has become unblocked/receive channel has data available, a handler will be called right then; there's no timer involved. Timers are just for things that have no relevant IO to control them, like animations.

[oakwhiz]

What would be cool is the ability to right click on a tab and give it priority so that it runs with higher performance.

[zZorgz]

Google did make battery life improvements by reducing wakes at least on the Mac in response to Safari performing better. Some interesting details are at https://plus.google.com/+PeterKasting/posts/GpL63A1K2TF

Perhaps Edge will a nice competitive impact on the Windows side :P.

[MBCook]

Perhaps they should have cared years ago when this problem was first clear. I don't know about on Windows but on OS X the difference has been massive for years and years.

[fsiefken]

That's odd, a month ago I read a statement from Opera that they had the most power efficient browser. Which is the most powerefficient? http://www.windowscentral.com/opera-adds-power-saving-mode-i...

[sp332]

The Anniversary Update isn't out yet, so Opera's power-saving mode is probably the best you can get at the moment.

[kraftman]

Trying to get a full days use out of my laptop I did some tests last week, Edge with adblock beats Opera with battery saver + adblock.

[gtirloni]

That's pretty nice but the lack of plugins means I can't have LastPass/1Password, uBlock, etc, which kills it for me.

[JBiserkov]

Extensions are coming with the anniversary update in a month or so, I'm excited!

[adrianlmm]

https://imgur.com/g31emJv

I'm using extensions.

[sumitgt]

You can use Lastpass/Adblock in the insider versions. It will roll out to everyone soon.

[partiallypro]

LastPass and AdblockPlus are already available to insiders. Still waiting on PrivacyBadger and Ghostery for my own preference.

[personjerry]

But how does it compare to Safari on Apple computers? AFAIK Safari is extremely power efficient.

[cptskippy]

That's really an Apples to Oranges comparison since Macs and PCs aren't comparable. Yes you could run Windows in BootCamp but it isn't tuned for that and is actually hampered. It would be like making a Surface Pro a hackintosh and using that as a basis for comparison.

[heisenbit]

There has been a lot of similar work on iOS. Check out the WWDC videos at developer.apple.com a year or more likely two back. It is quite amazing what can be done by schedulers and proper use of resources. I guess these optimizations have also found their way back into macOS and Safari on the laptop platform. Considering the release frequency who knows for sure but at least Apple claims their broswer is very efficient.

It is worth noting that some of the changes go really deep in the architecture and are not easy to pull off. I think lack of system level focus on low battery and the need to do deep changes in the OS are the reasons for the considerable lateness of Microsoft on this front.

[kalleboo]

Well half the things on the list Apple announced they were doing like 2 years ago

[ohitsdom]

Really sad that so much engineering time from browser teams is still spent on flash. Can we just let this tech die already?

[MikusR]

If you can get all the flash developers on Kongregate switch.

[theseatoms]

Even better, a more standards-efficient browser would reduce the economic resources allocated (by the market) towards ensuring site compatibility across the web, and therefore power.

[talles]

The item 3 is very impressive. Anyone knows if the other major browsers test for such thing?

[MBCook]

Apple cares a ton about this for obvious reasons. They want to claim all day use on their products and having s very efficient web browser is a big part of it.

[yitchelle]

As computing moves from a desktop centric function to a mobile centric function, a more power efficient software should be one of the top design requirements. This is a problem across all platforms.

Imagine if your phone/laptop's full charge lasts for 1 week instead of 1 day.

[j45]

Why was Safari excluded? It's an interesting data point in the power-efficiency topic.

[ygra]

Doesn't run on Windows. So you'd change more than the browser running on otherwise exactly the same machine, making a comparison difficult.

[piyush_soni]

Doesn't Chrome already do that Javascript timer slow down for background tabs?

[slyrus]

tl;dr probably: use an ad blocker

[tapirl]

The problem of Edge is its usability, it is full of annoying bugs and incomplete functions, just like the Windows 10.

- a Windows 8 lover.

[growthape]

I believe they are too late to bring this up.

[mtgx]

I wish they didn't do these tests on a Microsoft-made Surface Book...They should've taken a couple of other popular Windows 10 notebooks and maybe do the tests on those. Who knows how much of this difference is because of Edge itself (which is how well it would work on other notebooks, too), and how much it's the optimization they did for Edge for their own hardware.

[eightysix_four]

They say they test across hardware in the article - the Surface Book is the only one they pictured because it's an MS blog and an opportunity to advertise MS hardware.

Besides, I'm pretty sure lowering the number of frames in an animation (among the other fixes/features they mention) is going to pretty much universally lower power requirements.

[kylealden]

We chose the Surface Book because it's instrumented with a chip that allows direct measurement of instantaneous power consumption, which most OEM devices don't have, and because it has lots of battery for a fun run-down video :)

[cheeze]

Another great way to save a ton of energy and bandwidth is to block ads. Glad to see that they are finally allowing ads. Been long enough.

Still a mediocre browser though IMO. iamleppert nailed it on the head.

[zeta0134]

Do you mean that they are finally allowing ad blockers, via the extension support coming this summer?

[acqq]

re: The reading mode button animation batery use improved

Who needs the button animation at all? I like them not moving, every movement of something that's always on the same place is distracting.

It's stunning on what they spend the energy of the management and the programmers, not only of the CPU's and GPU's of all of us.

"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."

Apparently XAML is a traditional way to animate GUI buttons there. Wow.

[kylealden]

It's a hint to users that reading mode may provide a better experience. When we introduced it, reading mode usage went up; without the (very subtle) animation, users weren't aware when the feature would be useful.