Windows 10 April 2018 Update battery test: Edge beats Chrome again, brags Microsoft

Video: Microsoft reruns it Edge battery-life test using Windows 10 April 2018 Update.

Source: Microsoft/YouTube

The latest installment of Microsoft's browser battery challenge shows once again that Edge consumes less energy than Chrome and Firefox.

With the Windows 10 April 2018 Update rolling out across the globe, Microsoft thinks it's once again time to square Edge up against Chrome and Firefox in a new battery-life test.

Microsoft's browser experiment shows a time-lapse of "three identical devices, three different browsers, streaming one video". Firefox, Edge, and Chrome play what appears to be a Netflix video on three Surface Books.

As usual, the Edge device lasts the longest, depleting the battery after 14 hours and 20 minutes. The Chrome device lasted 12 hours and 32 minutes, while the Firefox laptop ran out of steam after just seven hours and 15 minutes.

"This experiment showed that battery life on a PC running Microsoft Edge lasts 98 percent longer than Mozilla Firefox and 14 percent longer than Google Chrome," Microsoft says on its YouTube channel.

For unknown reasons, the devices last about two hours less than when Microsoft tested the three browsers on a Surface Book running the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update this January.

See: 20 pro tips to make Windows 10 work the way you want (free PDF)

Also notable is that Microsoft's battery life updates show that Google has slowly but surely closed the gap between Chrome and Edge on the Surface Book. Back then, Microsoft boasted that Edge lasted "up to 63 percent longer than Mozilla Firefox and up to 19 percent longer than Google Chrome".

Before that, an April 2017 battery life test on Surface Books with the Windows 10 Creators Update showed the Edge device lasting 77 percent longer than Firefox, and 35 percent longer than Chrome.

And a 2016 ad from Microsoft showed that Edge lasted 70 percent longer than a PC running Chrome.

So the ads may have prompted Chrome developers to improve battery-life performance but appear to have done little to convince Windows 10 PC owners to switch from Chrome to Edge.

Figures from the US Government's Digital Analytics Program (DAP) in April showed that Edge's share among visitors using Windows 10 declined from 20.3 percent in Q2 2017 to 19.4 percent in Q1 2018, according to a report by ZDNet's Ed Bott. In other words, about 80 percent of Windows 10 users set some browser other than Edge as their default.

A large chunk of them obviously choose Chrome. DAP figures over the period showed Chrome remained steady at 56 percent of Windows 10 machines, while Internet Explorer rose three percentage points to 14.8 percent, and Firefox declined from 11 percent to nine percent.

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