In a mobile age in which jockeying for a seat near an outlet in a Starbucks may soon be considered America's real national pastime, the prospect of being untethered from our chargers for even a few extra minutes is huge. That's why the mere acknowledgement by Apple's CEO that killing your apps probably won't save your iPhone's battery life makes national news.
Today it's Microsoft who's dropping a battery life bomb on its competitor Google. In the video above, Microsoft runs an experiment using four identical laptops running four different web browsers: Google Chrome, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, and Microsoft's own Edge browser (R.I.P. Internet Explorer). In Microsoft's video, the company says the laptops stream an identical video until their batteries run out of juice.
The first laptop to go dark is the one running the world's most popular browser since 2012, Google Chrome, which only makes it to four hours and 19 minutes before tapping out. Firefox hangs in there for five hours and nine minutes, with Opera coming in second place at six hours and 18 minutes. First place? No surprises there, it's Edge, which lasts for seven hours and 22 minutes.
Now remember, this video is coming from Microsoft. It's not an independent experiment; it's essentially a commercial for Edge. That doesn't mean you can discount it, though, especially since there are federal regulations governing these kinds of claims when companies make them in their marketing.
One very popular web browser that's missing from this experiment is Apple's Safari. You could make the comparing apples to oranges argument, since Edge doesn't run on Macs, but we'd be curious to see what how long a comparable Macbook running Safari would have lasted in this test.
