If you are like me, you are always worried about the battery life of you laptop. It’s always a struggle to find the next power outlet and you definitely don’t want to be left without power when you are in the middle of doing something important. So to safe battery life you disable all the not necessary applications and only use what you need at that moment. But what if you have to go online? Maybe you will need to write your article online like I do, or you need to research something. On moment like that, it’s good to know what web browser will give you the best battery life. I understand that you don’t all have time to do the research on that, so I created my setup to test your software.
The testing procedure
I don’t have many pc’s in my house and since I had some work that needed to be done, I decided to use my MacBook Air to do the testing. Because this test wasn’t about how long you can use your computer when the different type of browsers I could easily use my MacBook with virtual Windows for this. For the testing I created a simple Mac script with a counter till how long it would take before my Mac would be at 1% of its power. I reinstalled Mac OSX, removed all the auto shutdown and energy-efficient timers, installed Parallels with a clean copy of Windows 8.1 and the latest version of all the major browsers: Internet Explorer 11, Firefox 26, Chrome 32 and Opera 18. Windows 8.1 was up-to-date and all the browsers had no add-ons or toolbars installed. To simulate the complete browser experience on all the different browsers, I used the Peacekeeper battery test. In the battery test mode Peacekeeper will loop all the tests until the battery is depleted.
The testing results are
| # | Browser | Total time | Percentage |
| 1 | Internet Explorer 11 Metro | 7:13 | 0% |
| 2 | Internet Explorer 11 Desktop | 6:59 | -6,64% |
| 3 | Firefox 30 | 5:49 | -20.17% |
| 4 | Chrome 35 | 5:34* | -22.02% |
| 5 | Opera 22 | 5:33* | -22.14% |
*There could easily be a registration error with Chrome and Opera and they might need to share there 4th and 5th places.
[toggle title=”Disclaimer”]My script only checked the Parallels emulation once every few seconds, so it’s possible that Chrome and Opera might have to share there 4th and 5th place. The total time might not be representative for your own browser experience as it has been done in a Parallels virtualization Windows while using a MacBook Air 13″.[/toggle]Tips to improve your battery life
I will soon be doing a good and complete article on how to get the best battery life (check here¯ to see if I already created the article). But for now, I have a few easy tips to improve your battery life for now.
- Using power plans to save your battery
- Turning down the brightness on your screen
- Decreasing the amount of display time that elapses before your screen dims
- Make sure you’re read the manufacturer’s instructions for charging and maintaining your battery. Only use a charger and power cord supplied by the manufacturer.
- Don’t let your battery get too hot (or too cold).
- Use your battery to keep it fresh. Don’t keep your computer plugged in all the time. It’s a good idea to discharge and then recharge your laptop battery about once a month.
- Reduce the task level, learn to single task
