A YouTuber has taken it into his hands to resolve the silent war over battery life benchmarks currently raging between Microsoft, Google, and Opera.

This war has been going on since last year when Microsoft started publishing claims that Edge was far better at preserving a laptop's battery life than other browsers.

Both Google and Opera contested these claims, but Microsoft stood firm on its position, even creating and open-sourcing a benchmark for carrying out such tests, and re-affirming Edge's superiority after the release of the Creators Update in April this year.

YouTuber disproves Microsoft claims

In a video posted on his YouTube channel, Canadian YouTube star Linus Sebastian, known online as Linus Tech Tips, decided to create his own benchmark and put all four major browsers — Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Opera — through an independent test to assess their true capabilities.

His test involved buying four identical Dell Inspiron laptops, disabling all their bloatware — including Windows telemetry — and leaving the laptops running overnight, browsing the web via automated scripts.

His results showed that Chrome, and not Edge, takes the smallest toll on laptop batteries, and it does so on a more consistent basis, unlike Edge, who's battery life drainage varied wildly between different iterations of the same test.

Furthermore, Opera also faired better than Edge, who managed to beat only Firefox, a browser that Mozilla never claimed it was built to save battery life in the first place.

Chrome beats Edge in Microsoft's own test

Last but not least, Linus also used the test rig to reproduce Microsoft's own tests, the one based on its open source benchmark. This test's results didn't go Microsoft's way either, with Chrome, once more, beating Edge for the top spot, and Opera nabbing second place again.

On the positive side of things, Linus says that the Creators Update did indeed improve Edge's battery life, but not enough to jump over Opera and Chrome.

In the past two years, whenever a browser maker would contest its Edge benchmark tests, Microsoft would respond with a new blog post. Let's see if Linus' test yields such an answer from the Redmond-based OS maker.

Below is Linus' YouTube video detailing the test results.





Image credits: Linus Tech Tips