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MS - IE, optimised for Flash | 457 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
This matters?
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 07 2013 @ 07:42 AM EDT
Lets pretend for a second that Microsoft's study is correct, who cares? A
browser is such a miniscule percent of the power a laptop consumes anyways...
Actually, I bet I can make a browser that consumes less energy then firefox, IE,
or chrome. I'll take firefox's code base, find the rendering code, and make
everything half as bright.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

How many ways to cheat here ??
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 07 2013 @ 07:46 AM EDT
IE being deeply integrated into the OS... Have 'they'
considered that MS-using-machines reputedly needs more
powerful / power-hungry hardware for the same functionality.

Never mind: this is a comparison of colors of the sky. It's
all blue to me ;-)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

More MS FUD: IE is more energy efficient than other browsers
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 07 2013 @ 09:03 AM EDT
Did MS check the benchmark beforehand, and then pre-optimise IE for it?


They've done it before, so it's worth asking.


Never mind that what they're actually saying is that the Flash plugin for
Firefox/Chrome is more power-hungery than the one for IE. Since Flash is
obsolete, shouldnt'they be comparing the HTML5 renderers instead?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

when I saw this it entertained me
Authored by: designerfx on Friday, June 07 2013 @ 09:07 AM EDT
this is the weakest "we'd like to remain relevant" I've ever
seen, even from MS.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Use Internet Explorer - it's good for the environment! lol - n/t
Authored by: Gringo_ on Friday, June 07 2013 @ 09:42 AM EDT
gotta be good for something, I guess...

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

If this was really important
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 07 2013 @ 10:21 AM EDT

We'd see Microsoft rushing to produce IE versions for IOS, Android, and
Mac OSX.

Since we don't...

Wayne
http://madhatter.ca

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • ROFL ( n/t ) - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 07 2013 @ 12:07 PM EDT
Using maths...
Authored by: Nick_UK on Friday, June 07 2013 @ 11:03 AM EDT
... I guess this is right - less people use it, so it will
use less power.

Nick :)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

More MS FUD: IE is more energy efficient than other browsers
Authored by: JamesK on Friday, June 07 2013 @ 11:55 AM EDT
Did they use Excel to determine this? ;-)

---
The following program contains immature subject matter.
Viewer discretion is advised.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

I can't argue...
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 07 2013 @ 01:17 PM EDT
Since on my box, IE uses no power at all!

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

  • I can't argue... - Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 08 2013 @ 03:38 AM EDT
More MS FUD: IE is more energy efficient than other browsers
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 07 2013 @ 01:30 PM EDT
I'm betting they didn't run Firefox with any plugins to selectively disable
scripts, such as NoScript or
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/suspend-background-tabs/

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

IE is optimized for Flash
Authored by: SpaceLifeForm on Friday, June 07 2013 @ 02:25 PM EDT
Spyware is not as obvious when the user does not
notice a browser slowdown.

When a malicious flash ad hits, they don't want you
to see the https requests going to unrelated servers.


---

You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

More MS FUD: IE is more energy efficient than other browsers
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 07 2013 @ 03:16 PM EDT
> 18.6 percent less wattage than Google Chrome.

That may be because Chrome is faster. It may consume 18.6% more wattage but it
it does this 25% faster then it uses less electricity.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

You've got to look at the overall TCO!
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 07 2013 @ 04:35 PM EDT
IE is part of the Windows OS, so it could (in theory) share some of the same
intrinsic functionalities. However, Windows is so bloated and inefficient... it
requires so much more power in the hardware for a decent user experience. For a
comparably useful computer, I have no doubt that you can use considerably less
energy with non-Windows. On Windows, IE may well add less to the power
consumption than Chrome, Firefox, etc., even if it takes a lot of work to
determine the significance of the difference.

However, for overall efficiency, only an idiot would use IE on Windows, because
of the security risks. A US State Department agent once told me that some parts
of our government are aware (a suprise for me!), and agents are forbidden to use
IE. Even if IE does use less energy on Windows ... at least until its
insecurities let an energy-using piece of malware in... using IE brings on a
considerably higher risk of energy-using malware than a browser that is not
integrated into the OS. Using IE shows about as much computer intelligence as
sending money in response to the classic Nigerian spam-mail.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

MS - IE, optimised for Flash
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 07 2013 @ 04:39 PM EDT
A browser for the twentieth century, oh wait ...

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Now compare it to Chrome/Firefox on Linux with no botnet running in the background [N/T]
Authored by: bugstomper on Friday, June 07 2013 @ 04:50 PM EDT

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

More MS FUD: IE is more energy efficient than other browsers
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 08 2013 @ 03:11 AM EDT
Let's see;
There are Lies,
Damn Lies,
Statistics and
Microsoft Numbers
in that order.

Chris B

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

IE power usage so bad they had to hide the testing procedure
Authored by: ailuromancy on Sunday, June 09 2013 @ 03:57 AM EDT

If your experiment gives valuable results, you publish what you did in sufficient detail that others can repeat your experiment to confirm your results or point out the flaw. This Microsoft funded study is as vague and secretive as a cold fusion claim. Which are the top ten web sites? Loading and displaying a web page requires some energy. If the page has some animation on it, keeping the page updated requires power. The study has figures for 'average power', which I assume means the web pages are downloaded, displayed and then updated for some time. How much time?

Benchmarks have a terrible reputation for being fiddled. Changing the name of a program from quake to quack gave very different benchmarks because a graphics driver used the name to enable quake-specific optimisations (quake was used for bench marking, and people would falsely assume the good score in quake implied other games would be rendered just as fast). This study chose the fish bowl benchmark. This benchmark was created by Microsoft, so we can assume it was optimised only for IE. While we are at it, Microsoft could have programmed Windows to use more power when you use the 'wrong' browser. In the spirit of openness, the study does not tell us how many fish, or how many frames per second.

If wind turbines produced cost effective power, they would quote unsubsidised installation and yearly maintenance costs and the amount that the electricity generated sold for. As they need to prevent embarrassing comparisons, they say something like 'enough electricity for 10,000 homes', but miss out 'with 100% load factor' (30% is realistic), petrol powered transport, gas heating, gas cooking and one communal bath per week. This study uses the phrase 'enough to power 10,000 traditional homes'. I assume a traditional home has no fridge or freezer and uses oil lamps.

In the spirit of secret misleading benchmarks, I would like to put my Raspberry Pi in with the results. I do not have a handy way to measure how much power a π uses, but the π's power supply is limited to to 3.5W so I will use this maximum figure for everything. While I am at it, the π is a 'desktop', not a notebook. The web sites might take ages to load and update sporadically, but they will use 3.5W or less. Big Buck Bunny is used to demonstrate the Pi's video decoder. It decodes flawlessly at 1080p. Using Raspberry Pi's instead of IE gives a power saving of over 90%, enough to cancel the construction of 40,000 windmills.

[Full disclosure: WINE can (with some determined effort) be cross compiled for ARM, and use qemu to run Windows programs. People have got IE to run under WINE (with difficulty, with restrictions, probably old version of IE only). It might be possible to run crawl IE on a Pi using WINE and qemu. This would get IE to use 3.5W. If you have a few days to spare, and you get this to work, try the fish bowl benchmark. Pi+Iceweasel displays 10 fish at 1080p and 5 seconds per frame. Xorg does not understand the Pi's secret video accelerator. X forwarded over ssh to a 1280x800 hardware accelerated display updated at 9 frames per second.]

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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