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Is Your Browser Stealing Precious Battery Life?
Why Laptop Battery Claims Are So Useless, And Why That Won't Soon Change

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Gators15
09/15/09

In reply to Is Your Browser Stealing Precious Battery Life?
IE8 may save a few minutes of battery, but I'll keep my WebKit based browser, thank you.
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szrimaging
09/15/09

@Gators15: Safari or Chrome?

Cause, you know, FF is Gecko.
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jdale
09/14/09

In reply to Is Your Browser Stealing Precious Battery Life?
Isn't Safari based on WebKit? And isn't WebKit the basis for a lot of mobile device browsers? Seems interesting if the browser core that is used in mobile devices is the one that wastes the most power.
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szrimaging promoted this comment jdale was starred jdale was unstarred

szrimaging
09/15/09

@jdale: Apple didn't do a good job on making Safari for Windows very stream lined like they do for everything else. For one thing, the font rendering it does is not native in windows so it has to eat up extra cycles just to make fonts all pretty and mac like. It is the only browser that I am aware of on Windows that does this.
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HeartBurnKid: Agent of R.O.A.C.H.
09/14/09

In reply to Is Your Browser Stealing Precious Battery Life?
Yet another reason to use Adblock.

I'm curious, though; how would Seamonkey fare?
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mr.leman
09/14/09

In reply to Is Your Browser Stealing Precious Battery Life?
I have been, unfortunately, using Safari 4 for a while now, but this officially confirmed my switch back to Firefox (for about the fifth time). Also, does anyone know if these results are accurate on OSX?
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Daniel Grinton
09/14/09

@mr.leman: I can sort of attest for it being the same. Safari 4 is pretty power hungry simply because it uses so much flashy shit like the popular sites page. I mean, really, do I need to have the sites I visit most highlighted in GPU accellerated glory?
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UnderLoK promoted this comment Daniel Grinton was starred Daniel Grinton was unstarred

UnderLoK
09/14/09

@mr.leman: I was actually surprised seeing as though FF uses 500+mb of ram during long/heavy browsing. My MB gets crap battery life, but I've never bothered comparing (I use FF and wouldn't think of changing).
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wutlulzky
09/14/09

In reply to Is Your Browser Stealing Precious Battery Life?
That graph needs to be recalculated with the newest version of FF (3.5.3)
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chefgon
09/14/09

@wutlulzky: I'm pretty sure there's a new version of Firefox released every 20 minutes.
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UnderLoK
09/14/09

@wutlulzky: Why bother, I mean seriously... Mine at this moment is using 529mb of ram... I'm sure that has something to do with the results.

Even with the loss in life compares to IE it's not like any of us are going to switch to IE.
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szrimaging
09/15/09

@chefgon: Nope, that's Chrome. FF is on a 40 minute cycle.
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mman1506
09/14/09

In reply to Is Your Browser Stealing Precious Battery Life?
chome who created that browser
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UnderLoK
09/14/09

@mman1506: Gogle
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AndGo
09/14/09

@UnderLoK: As wing and a miss! haha

...sorry... Typos sometimes amuse me.
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UnderLoK
09/15/09

@AndGo: Honestly, I rarely ever notice them. I guess it's from spending years and years on IRC.
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AndGo
09/15/09

@UnderLoK: "As wing and a miss!"

Damn! I did it to myself! D:<
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Bawb - The One, The Only, The Builder
09/14/09

In reply to Is Your Browser Stealing Precious Battery Life?
IE8 is, so to say, bad.
Firefox, so to say, is good.
Adblock, so to say, is awesome.
7 minutes, so to say, is not life-or-death time difference.
When someone asks me what browser to use, so to say, I say Firefox with Adblock.
So, to say, Firefox + adblock trumps IE8.
Hell, Firefox by itself (so to say) is better than IE8.
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UnderLoK promoted this comment

UnderLoK
09/14/09

@Bawb - The One, The Only, The Builder: I don't block ads because the sites I visit need the revenue and if we all blocked the ads the sites wouldn't exist.

Maybe if I spent the day looking at anime porn I would install it... ;)
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Edited by UnderLoK at 09/14/09 7:23 PM UnderLoK was starred UnderLoK was unstarred

outie
09/14/09

In reply to Is Your Browser Stealing Precious Battery Life?
I believe most of the power has gone to processing the multimedia rich ads like the ones on THIS web site.
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UnderLoK promoted this comment outie was starred outie was unstarred

UnderLoK
09/14/09

@outie: Yea I hate those ads that pay the bills. I mean this is the internet, everything is free, why should we have to look at ads I mean the site has to pay for itself.
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Weihovah
09/14/09

In reply to Is Your Browser Stealing Precious Battery Life?
ie8 might have the longest run time but if you're clicking around a lot, you'll lose a second or two loading webpages (at least when compared to firefox) and waste even more time if you're on pages w/ flash
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John Herrman
09/14/09

@Weihovah: Yeah, this is a fair point. Also, mouse gestures and various streamlining extensions make me much more efficient on FF or Opera than on IE8, so the extra time might not necessarily mean much.
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UnderLoK
09/14/09

@Weihovah: Flash is faster in FF?!

@John Herrman: Personally speaking, all I use is right click + t, right click +k, ctrl+t, backspace, and that is about it. For whatever reason I can't seem to get into the other ones just because I don't use them enough.
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Will Pridgen
09/14/09

In reply to Is Your Browser Stealing Precious Battery Life?
What about on a mac? Certainly there will be differences because all but 2 of those browsers are offered to the average mac user, and certainly there will be some battery life differentiations across different OS's.
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UnderLoK promoted this comment Will Pridgen was starred Will Pridgen was unstarred

UnderLoK
09/14/09

@Will Pridgen: 2 of the browsers? There is only one, Firefox... Learn to count!
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dinniedraco
09/14/09

@UnderLoK: I supposed officially there is one. But Chrome came out in dev mode for the Mac, and it is surprisingly good, except with no flash support and some crashes. I hope they hurry up with the beta and then the proper release!
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UnderLoK
09/15/09

@dinniedraco: Even if they cleaned it up the lack of plugin/addon just makes a switch impossible for me.
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nightwheel
09/14/09

In reply to Is Your Browser Stealing Precious Battery Life?
Really? Who uses Safari for Windows?
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Mike Zuniga: That was Unexpected promoted this comment nightwheel was starred nightwheel was unstarred

Xjep
09/14/09

@nightwheel: People who got it from Apple update when they installed Itunes
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Mike Zuniga: That was Unexpected
09/14/09

@nightwheel: I do. It's very speedy and if it wasn't for all those Firefox extensions that I couldn't live without, I'd switch over to it completely.
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beekerstudios: you are inane and stupid
09/14/09

@nightwheel: curious as to why so many "windows" users think us "apple" users are so anti-windows, when they themselves have this utter HATE for apple.

Stop the hate, try it, if it's not for you, move on. The constant bashing of apple products is tired and played out. 90% of the haters haven't even tried out OS X, Apple products, or anything, just HATE them because it's "cool".

BTW, I don't make the apple ads, just a user, I find some of them funny, some of them are kind of pointless. I know the retort is going to be then apple should stop hating windows/pc's with their adverts.

IE (6,7,8) I hate to break it to you on all sides of the fence is a browser that is just not well liked. By developers, for many reasons. Anything, and I mean anything is pretty much better, except where some stupid ass app developer ONLY develops for it.
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zeroprime
09/14/09

@beekerstudios: Because windows users get fed a load of BS about how great things like iTunes are and then they have the distinct displeasure of actually using it on a Windows machine.

Doesn't matter, though, if you want good battery life use linux and browse with Elinks (no flash for you!)
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UnderLoK
09/14/09

@Xjep: HAHAHA!

Wow man, that was great...
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Edited by UnderLoK at 09/14/09 7:28 PM UnderLoK was starred UnderLoK was unstarred

UnderLoK
09/14/09

@zeroprime: I agree with you: Lynx too high tech for ya?
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Geisrud
06/18/09

In reply to Why Laptop Battery Claims Are So Useless, And Why That Won't Soon Change
I recently just spec'ed out some new laptops for my sales reps. I talked to the vendor about the "newly designed laptops, designed for optimal power use". This had a 6-cell battery with a supposed 5-7 hour battery life.

So I ask him. Comeon, how long is the battery really gonna last for my reps who are actually working. 2-3 hours.
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Serolf Divad
06/18/09

In reply to Why Laptop Battery Claims Are So Useless, And Why That Won't Soon Change
Let's be honest: this is why we read hardware reviews. Frankly, I don't trust anything a manufacturer tells me about their machine. After all, anything a manufacturer tells you about the performance of their machine is much more of a marketing exercise than an objective list of technical specs. You want to know how long a machine's battery will last under real world conditions? Then go read Laptop Review or some similar publication.
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tetris2
06/18/09

In reply to Why Laptop Battery Claims Are So Useless, And Why That Won't Soon Change
Why not a pic of a Macbook instead? They have some of the boldest battery life claims. And it would keep up with the theme of the website right now, all Apple all the time.
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Kaiser-Machead
06/18/09

@tetris2: I don't know about the latest batch of Macbooks, but when my black Macbook was new, I was able to get just about 4 hours on light mobile duty. That wasn't so for the other two years, but for at least the first year, the official estimate and what I was able to get with real world use was not that far off.
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ospreyguy
06/18/09

In reply to Why Laptop Battery Claims Are So Useless, And Why That Won't Soon Change
I think I will build the best battery of all time using lemons.
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Hello Mister Walrus
06/18/09

@ospreyguy: Haha! My lemon batteries are superior, as I add a secret electrolyte, the identity of which I will never tell you. Oh, what the hell - it's urine.
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