most battery efficient browser?

ive read that ie9 seems to be the most battery effeicient browser. however when comparing it (non-scientifically) to my default chrome with adblock, chrome seems to last longer on battery.
what is the most efficient stock browser and what is the most efficient browser with extensions atm?

 

Extensions are a whole other variable.

IE9 should be the best. Firefox comes up second, Chrome third, Opera close behind Chrome and equal/ahead in some cases.

 

According to the Opera dev team, some pretty significant tweaks were made to improve power efficiency in the most recent revision (11.10), so I'm not sure how accurate those numbers are. IE9 does seem to have the best hardware acceleration I've seen so far (at least on my X120e), so I wouldn't be surprised if it did turn out to be the most power-efficient.

 

Those tweaks are likely linked to GPU acceleration, which was just introduced in Opera.

And yeah, IE9 has the best GPU acceleration and I'd say Chrome has the worst.

 

ah gpu acceleration.
i think ie9 is indeed leveraging my gpu and in doing so it ends up using more power.
my gpu idles quite well but im guessing that when flash uses it, it causes a significant power draw.
i think that and the use of adblock in google chrome seem to be the reason why i get much better battery life with chrome...

 

maybe but im thinking gpu acceleration might have a bigger impact

and i dont think ie9 has an adblock or any ad filter out yet

 

Not officially, but you can find a few different options if you Google for it.

Also, for Opera users, note that there is Flash-blocking built-in, which will definitely help battery life. Press Ctrl + F12, go to the Advanced tab, select Content, then tick "Enable plugins only on demand." Then, Flash elements will be replaced by a "play" symbol that you click once to activate.

 

i did search for an ie9 solution but the reviews and comments were mostly negative.
im waiting for a more effective solution, does ie have an official website where you can d/l tried, tested and secure extensions like you can for ff and chrome?

 

ok i just installed simpleadblock as it seems like the safest and most popular ie9 ad blocking solution. it gets soso reviews though but ill see how it goes...

 

Actually, I too am looking for an efficient flash ad-blocker for IE9. As far as the extensions and add-ons for IE9 goes, you can take a look here.

I have read in some places that using host lists/ files help with blocking ads etc in IE9. But I have never used them so I would not know.

I wonder if I am violating the rules of the forum by discussing this. If yes, then apologies and please consider the post deleted.

 

ive seen ieaddons before and most of what you find there are pjinned links etc to various websites

 

flash ads have a huge impact on batterylife. i tested firefox with and without adblock. had a huge impact (but my cpu was slow thus flash could nearly max out the cpu just with having one or two ads running).

 

I would go with the host file instead of an add-on, IMHO its more efficient.

 

im also thinking of the effect of browser gpu accelerationon battery life. wgouatching a gpu accelerated youtube vid, especially if its a powerful discrete gpu, could eat up battery quite fast since performance gpus use more power than the cpu.
my 485m downclocks quite well, but in the presence of gpu acceleration, im sure it is operating at a much higher base frequency and thus drawing more power.
since ive already installed an adblocker on ie9, ill try comapring gpu-z info between chrome and ie9 while watching youtube videos.

 

trvlbug, I've wondered about that too. But GPU acceleration SHOULD save battery... I just wonder if there's a point where it starts hurting more than it helps.

 

i did a yt video on both chrome on ie9 with gpuz running and to my surprise there was hardly a difference between sensors values. also, clocks remained at idle levels.
so either both are accelerating efficiently, or are not accelerating at all. but nevertheless, gpu acceleration doesnt seem to be a factor in browser efficiency between the two.

 

i only have the intel integrated gpu's, and there, hardware acceleration saves power.

any GOOD gpu should save power compared to a cpu on the SAME task. but most gamer gpu's are not designed with efficiency in mind. so they turn on to full power consumtion to play back your youtube video while they would not need to.

but as more and more hardware acceleration is an alltime business (aero glass is hw accelerated, my windows phone 7 is 100% hardware based ui), gpu manufacturers have to redesign the way gpu speeds up and slows down to use as few energy as possible.

it's mainly a problem with older gpu's only anyways.

 

heck must be really old even my 4850's have profiles for light demand

 

nvidia had for quite a while "oh, something 3d? full power!". which they even continued with vista out, so there huge power consumtion was the result with aero.

but yes, by now it should not be a problem anymore.

 

im really liking ie9 and im trying to test it more extensively on battery but i cant find a way to import my exported chrome bookmarks into it...

 

Enuff said.
Behold the most energy efficient web browser!

 

Energy efficient =\= Most efficient


I wonder how many people could get away with a text only browser these days...

 

ie9 with the gpu acceleration turned off
should be good on the battery

 

Disable flash to save battery life- Sacrilege

 

ie9 with gpu acceleration turned ON should be good on the battery.

guess what's more efficient at DRAWING, the gpu or the cpu?

 

good question. is a 384 core downclocked gpu more efficient than a quad core energy efficient cpu?
thats the question ive been asking.
does anyone have a link that compares ie9's battery efficiency with gpu acceleration turned on and oof. and hopefully one with a comparison from low. mid and high end gpus too

 

just based on the fact that a gpu can draw so much more than a cpu (i've did some software rendering work. both rastericing (what gpu's do) and raytracing), i can say that there's NO comparison.

a gpu laughts at drawing your browser window. and it does not have to use more than one or two of the 384 cores to still show it at 30-60 fps. (they are for the vertex and pixel and computeshaders, none of which are used much on the browser).

i don't know about the efficiency of a geforce. nvidia often showed lack of interest to be power efficient (but as they focus on cellphones too now, they sure changed there). but i know that every integrated gpu (which are the majority of gpus out there) uses MUCH less power doing browser stuff on the gpu, not the cpu.

hardware acceleration is always more efficient. and the geforces of today are (unlike the vista-first-days ones) all in idle-mode while drawing the browser (from what i've experienced none turned up a fan while running ie). so they are essentially not using LESS power when you disable hw acceleration, as they have a rather high idle cost anyways.

most likely, hw acceleration for browsers is about free on nowadays gpu's. would be interesting to verify that. but i don't have the resources.

 

mine does stay on idle wattage while viewing a youtube video but i dont know if ie9 accelerates that.
it had a 2-3% difference in gpu load as compared to chrome. and afaik gpu's cannot switch off cuda cores like cpu's can. iirc gpu load went up to 13% on ie9 and i dont think that is 'free hw acceleration' as you put it.
but as you say, things may be different for igp/lowend gpu's.
hopefully anand or some other tech sites do a benchmark on this soon so we get a definitive answer.

 

gpu's don't turn off the cores ever, even while idling. they just slow down and reduce the power. at least external gpu's like the ones from nvidia do.

and yes, everything in ie9 is hw accelerated including watching the youtube video (as flash is hw accelerated mostly, too, by now).

but even this page is. everything. still, unless there's massive animations going on, they're mostly a one-time thing and thus not relevant at all.

 

but you did mention this. but as your last post states gpus cannot selectively turn off or slowdaown individual cores. and even if the cores are operating at idle power, the fact that it has a gpu load of 12-13%, again on 384 cores, just cant be free acceleration as you put it.
im turning off acceleration and see how it affects mybattery life.

 

no. but a core that is not in active use should use less power.

but it shouldn't affect batterylife as long as you don't do anything you couldn't do on cpu (like getting higher framerates in a webbased game).

if it does, then it would be another point in my list of why i would never buy nvidia

 

a gpu load of 0-1% isnt exaclty the same amount of power usage as 12-13%

 

on what webpage did it go up from 0-1% to 12-13%?

and no, it doesn't per se cost more power just by being in use. it only costs more the moment the gpu has to clock higher / increase voltage. which might not happen at 12-13% usage yet.

 

in a youtube video. it was a constant 12-13 while the vid was playing so it did cost more power.

 

well, that should not depend on the browser, as it's an addin anyways.

 

i really dont know what you mean but nevertheless im turning off gpu acceleration as i still get better battery life with chrome which is strange.

 

well, gpu acceleration on CHROME is not yet out of beta anyways.

what i mean is this: YOUTUBE VIDEOS GET PLAYED BACK WITH FLASH. ADOBE FLASH. so they are INDEPENDENT on the browser (even an individual executable in chrome).

 

exactly, so chrome should have worse battery life than ie9 with no video acceleration goin on but i am getting the reverse...

also, how a browser handles flash is a big part of a browsers performance. and they do handle it differently.

 

they don't handle flash. they give it over to flash, which then handles it themselfes. that's how plugins work.

 

thats what i though myself until i played dragon age on facebook. i get slightly different performance and graphical 'disotrtions' when played on chrome and ie9.

 

you know that chrome has it's own copy of flash, that is often more up to date (especially in the beta / dev channels) ?. and it uses that, not the one you have installed on the system.

this can result in differences. still, flash runs independent on the browser. that's the idea of a plugin.

 

true! that could be the cause of the difference. thanks

 

i'm on the devchannel myself. there are days i can't watch youtube or other flash stuff at all. most likely in a matter of hours, an update comes along and fixes it.

 

im on stable, hence no acceleration

 

I use Chrome for its speed but I have a ton of extensions running, mostly though Ad Blocker, Google Calendar, G-Mail Checker and Google Voice, but I have a few other minor ones like eBay and the Google Dictionary in there. But I find that it's easier to minimize other aspects of your laptop in order to save energy, such as for me:

• Underclocked/Undervolted my CPU (Intel C2D T9300)
• Brightness set to one bar above low
• Windows Power Options
  • Adjust HDD Idle Option to 1 minute
  • Adjust settings to Hibernate instead of Sleep
• Expand your RAM, more RAM reduces virtual memory usage
• Get a cooling unit below to manage the airflow
• Be conscious of how many programs you work with
• Cut down on external devices, unless its absolutely necessary
• Clean your battery's metallic contacts w/rubbing alcohol every 3 months
• Repaste your processor with a much more refined thermal grease.
  • Using IC Diamond 7, my temperatures dropped
• Get a larger battery, 9-cell battery

 

i'm curious about one point:


Brightness set to one bar above low

i do that, too.. why is it more dim there than on lowest? i thought that's just my one acting stupid.