Redmond is so very proud of its latest browser, Internet Explorer 10 that the software titan wastes no opportunity to showcase everything that it has put into it.
A new study conducted by the Center for Sustainable Energy Systems was the perfect occasion for Microsoft to bring IE10 into the spotlight — this time for its highly efficient usage of energy. In fact, the findings reveal that Microsoft’s browser is the most efficient one around on Windows 8.
Internet Explorer 10 uses less energy than Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome when tested to browse and display a large number of websites.
Tests revealed that IE10 uses 18 percent less energy. In other words, this means that if every Chrome and Firefox user in the United States switched to IE10 on Windows 8 for a year, the energy saved could power over 10,000 households in the United States for that year.
Researchers measured the energy consumption when browsing some of the most popular websites in the United States and playing Adobe Flash and HTML5 video content.
As Microsoft explained in a blog post:
“In the above scenarios, Internet Explorer 10 exhibited the lowest energy consumption. In some scenarios such as playing Adobe Flash video on laptop PCs, it was 18% more energy efficient than Google Chrome, and it was 17% more efficient than Mozilla Firefox in playing HTML5 video.”
The software titan used the occasion to state that users could save over 120 million kWh in electricity per year if they switched to Internet Explorer 10 from Firefox and Chrome:
“This is enough energy to power 10,722 households in the United States for an entire year and would eliminate the release of over 85,000 metric tons of Carbon Dioxide equivalent in greenhouse gas emissions.”
Can’t disagree with 85,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in greenhouse gas emissions!
Obviously, energy consumption would hardly be a major reason for people to make the switch from one browser to another, but it nevertheless shows that Microsoft has put in the necessary optimization in its software to minimize energy usage.
And this is something every software developer should follow, whenever possible.
