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Microsoft has been in the operating system game for decades, but now it's making a move in the web browser wars. 

Microsoft Edge, the first new browser interface and engine of this decade, comes with every shipping copy of Windows 10. Microsoft says it has "tens of millions of users," but it's barely a blip on most web browser market share reports. 

Even so, Microsoft has used the telemetry provided by those millions of users and an exhaustive battery of tests to prove that Microsoft Edge is actually a more battery-efficient browser than Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera. 

In a pair of blog posts published on Monday, Microsoft engineers outline how the current Edge browser can save up to 53 percent of your battery life on a Windows 10 system, as compared to other web browsers like Chrome and Firefox. The second, more technical post promises that the next Edge browser, which will ship with the upcoming Windows 10 Anniversary Update, will be even more energy efficient.

Jason Weber, Microsoft's director of program management for Microsoft Edge, explained that different web browsers consume energy in very different ways, much like cars don't all consume gas in the same way. Some are more efficient than others. Some run like they're always in the city while others operate in a more efficient highway miles mode.

Weber contends that Chrome is a city driver. "When you’re browsing the web with Chrome, like city miles, it wakes up, sprints to next stop light, stops and then sprints to next stop light. It's one way to get through city, but uses a lot of gas," he said. 

According to Weber, Chrome and Firefox are constantly talking to the operating system. He described it as waking up roughly 60 times a second (and sometimes up to 250 times a second).

Edge takes advantage of its deeper integration with the operating system to wake less frequently, he claimed. 

"Edge never wakes itself up ... We tell the OS that. 'Hey, we have work to do and you [the OS] tell us when it’s most efficient to do that work," said Weber.

For example, when you touch the screen of your Windows 10 touchscreen computer, the hardware wakes up, sends a message to the web browser on screen. If it's Chrome, Chrome then tells Windows 10 it needs to animate the screen to scroll up or down. With Edge, you can scroll the web page without, Weber said, waking it up. The OS is already there, ready to do the graphical work.

How do you know?

Having hours of more battery life on your laptop because you chose Edge over Chrome sounds amazing. But why should we trust these claims? Testing technology battery life is notoriously difficult. You have to have multiple test beds, with vanilla set-ups, nothing extraneous running in the background that could impact battery consumption and perfectly repeatable test scripts. Compounding this is the challenge of testing web page battery consumption. Every page is different and most of what consumes power happens in the background.

Microsoft had figured out a few ways to accurately test Web browser battery consumption

Weber acknowledged the challenge, but told me Microsoft had figured out a few ways to accurately test Web browser battery consumption. The team combined lab tests, telemetry from millions of Edge users, and a run-down test that it captured on video.

The lab tests were particularity impressive. They included 200 PCs, a mini, in-lab Internet, systems connected to voltage meters, and special computers with power-measurement chips built right onto the motherboard.

The video showed particularly impressive power gains. At one point, the system running Microsoft Edge ran 70 percent longer than the one running Google Chrome.

Next Level

Whether or not you believe Microsoft, the company is already busy ramping up power efficiency for the next, big Microsoft Edge release, which will arrive as part of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update later this summer.

According to a technical blog post by Microsoft Edge Program Manager Brandon Heenan, the Anniversary Update will address JavaScript access in background tabs. Instead of allowing JavaScript to continuously run in hidden tabs, it will slow it down to running once per second.

They're also re-architecting how Edge handles animations by removing duplicate frames at the beginning and end of loops.

However, no change may be more welcome that what the team plans to do with Flash. The Anniversary Update will make Flash a separate process and the system will pause any unnecessary Flash operations. It will also stop Flash if it becomes unstable, without impacting the rest of the browser session.

No doubt Google will have something to say about all this. 

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