Microsoft takes a swipe at Chrome over notebook battery drain

Chrome has gained a bit of a reputation for slaughtering battery life on notebooks and tablets, and Microsoft is honing in on that fact in a new campaign spruiking its Edge browser. The video puts Edge up against Chrome, Firefox, and Opera in web video battery run down tests (all running on Surface Books). The Surface Book running Chrome ran flat after 4 hours and 19 minutes, while the Surface Book with Edge lasted 7 hours and 22 minutes. Opera (with battery saver enabled) came in second, at 6 hours and 18 minutes, and Firefox took third place with 5 hours and 9 minutes of up time.

It's obviously worth taking this with a grain of salt; the results only take into account Microsoft's Surface Book. Other hardware could provide varying results. Most users don't watch non-stop video in their browsers, and the test doesn't take into account generic browsing.

Nonetheless, I've personally found that Chrome has typically resulted in a bigger drain on my battery than Edge on Windows, and Safari on Mac. Of course, battery life isn't always the main reason you pick one browser over another; Edge, for example, still doesn't support extensions.

If you've found Chrome sapping your notebook battery life but don't want to change browser, there are a few things you can try to get a bit more mileage per charge. These include closing tabs you're not using, especially ones that are constantly refreshing in the background (Twitter, Facebook, etc), deleting non-essential extensions, and settings plugins as click to play.