Microsoft Edge has retained its battery life advantage over competing browsers, the software giant claimed this week. Left unsaid, however, is that the gap is closing.

“What happens when three identical devices run different browsers?” the description of a Microsoft video posted to YouTube reads. “The Microsoft Edge team wanted to find out. This experiment showed that battery life on a PC running Microsoft Edge lasts 98% longer than Mozilla Firefox and 14% longer than Google Chrome.”

To be clear, what Microsoft is testing here is the battery life of the two top web browsers, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, compared to Microsoft Edge in the latest Windows 10 version, version 1803. And a 14 percent advantage over Chrome is indeed a win. But only barely, right? Doesn’t that seem smaller than was the case with previous Windows 10 releases?

I searched Thurrott.com for my stories about Edge’s advantages over Chrome in previous versions to find out. Here are a few key milestones.

In June 2016, Microsoft first touted battery life as a key advantage for Edge. And it claimed an incredible 47 percent battery life advantage over Chrome.

By April 2017, Microsoft was claiming that Edge provided 35 percent better battery life than Chrome when running in the Creators Update, or Windows 10 version 1703.

A year later, the advantage has fallen to just 14 percent. That’s actually quite a change, and I suspect that Microsoft shaming Google over the past few years might have played a role, with Google working to make improvements to the browser market leader.

Tagged with Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge