Internet Explorer 10 claimed to be "most energy efficient" web browser
Microsoft loves talking about its Internet Explorer 10 web browser, but who can blame them? This time around, however, the company was proud to proclaim that the new browser is the most energy efficient browser out of the bunch, according to the Center for Sustainable Energy Systems at Fraunhofer USA.
Microsoft says that when compared to Firefox or Chrome, Internet Explorer 10 uses up to 18% less energy. Because of this, the Redmond-based company notes that if every Firefox and Chrome user in the US switched to Internet Explorer 10, the energy saved could power over 10,000 households, according to Fraunhofer's study.
Of course, there were different results for different tests that were ran. For example, casual browsing of websites saw hardly no difference in the energy required by the three browsers. Where the differences became most notable were when the browsers were used to play Flash and HTML5 videos. Internet Explorer 10 saw the least energy consumption.
However, there was only a max difference of six watts between IE10 and Google Chrome when playing Flash video. All other results showed less of a difference between any browser. Nonetheless, in each of the tests, Internet Explorer 10 produced the lowest energy consumption out of the three browsers on both laptops and desktops.
Of course, having Internet Explorer 10 running on its native operating system, Windows 8, could have something to do with the exceptional performance, whereas Firefox and Chrome are third-party browsers. We're almost inclined to believe that Safari would yield the same results on Mac against Firefox and Chrome, but we're still going to stick with the third-party options for now.
