Chrome claims it improved battery life for Windows devices

Microsoft has been busy for the past few months claiming that its Edge browser provides “the best battery life” when compared to Chrome and Opera web browsers. Microsoft even placed Surface Books side by side and compared battery life performance by running Chrome, Opera One, Firefox and Edge on each. The result showed that Chrome eats up the most power of portable devices. They even generated notifications on Windows 10, pursuing their users to switch to Edge as their default browser.

When it comes to power saving in portable devices, it can’t be denied that Microsoft Edge has the upper hand. However, Chrome hasn’t taken Microsoft’s critique lightly and is finally responding with a new update.

Google claims that its Chrome 53 release is bundled with CPU and GPU enhancements along with two hours of additional playback time in Vimeo which gives an overall better performance compared to last year. Although “video playback time” isn’t a real world unit for battery life estimation, PC makers still use it to report power consumption on their devices because video playback gathers huge numbers and is used regularly by almost everyone. Looks like Google is carrying the same tradition as Microsoft for battery life comparison.

Google says that the recent improvements aren’t just confined to video playback:

“We’ve been improving battery life across the board, tracking progress using power measurement tools. As one example, Chrome for Mac now uses 33 percent less power for everything from videos and images to simple page scrolling. Whether you’re planning a vacation or getting work done, you now get more browsing time from a single battery charge.” stated Google.

Alongside consumption improvements, Google also made some UI enhancements and made over the system with Material Design in their latest update to improve overall user experience quality.

Google also claims you get two hours of extra battery life after comparing the battery performance of Chrome 46 and Chrome 53 by playing HTML5 videos from Vimeo, Facebook, and YouTube. However, it still remains unclear whether Chrome 53 offers an enhanced battery performance while normal browsing on Windows 10.

Google has yet to publish any test results or conduct any studies to support its claim. Chrome may or may not match up to Microsoft Edge’s battery life quality in a single leap, but it is good to see that Google is trying best on their part to overcome their shortcomings.

After Windows, it would be best for Google to address its flaws on Mac platform.