For your reading Pleasure

Dennis5mile   Thanks for posting this article.

From the article: "Outside the Microsoft Edge browser, users of other browsers on Windows PCs sometimes face inconsistent feature-sets and performance/battery-life across device types. As you know, we’ve recently started making contributions that provide these types of hardware support to Chromium-based browsers, and we believe that this approach can be generalized: we think we can help to accelerate the web and users’ experience of it by contributing new capabilities to Chromium open source for the benefit of all these browsers and users."

Microsoft's commitment to improve battery-life across device types is something I've been hoping for.

Microsoft has done a lot of work to tune Windows 10 to improve battery life, and although improvements have been made in recent iterations of the Linux kernel, Linux distros typically get about only about 60-70% of the battery life of Windows 10.  It is a known, and aggravating issue for Linux users.

What is true of Linux is also true of Chromium-based browsers. Chromium-based browsers (relative to Edge Classic) are notorious for high resource use and battery drain.

You can do an informal "show me" comparison of Edge Classic and Edge Chromium resource use for yourself by opening identical instances of the two browsers and then checking Task Manager. Doing that doesn't tell the whole story (Edge Classic uses resources more sparingly than Edge Chromium during operation, and that is the more important part of the story) but it will give you a rough idea.

The following is a quick look at the resource use of Edge (small "e" in a blue square) and Edge Chromium (large "e" standalone), each opened with a single Bing tab and otherwise configured as identically as possible:

I've been keeping a close eye on resource use over the last few days to gather data on another resource use issue. During that period, using both browsers similarly, I've never seen Edge use more than 1gb of memory resources. I've frequently seen Edge Chromium climb to 2gb of memory use, and sometimes higher. As an informal rule-of-thumb, my guess is that Edge Chromium uses about 1.5x to 2x the memory resources of Edge Classic during similar operations.

I haven't yet seen any evaluations comparing Edge Classic and Edge Chromium resource use in the techincal press (it is premature at this point), but I have seen evaluations comparing Edge Classic and Chrome resource use, which reach the conclusion that Chrome has significantly higher resource use than Edge Classic.