 Microsoft's been trying their darndest to make their edge browser happen. An uphill battle given Internet Explorer's reputation among consumers. And I would say that alongside the strategically placed and, yeah, I'm gonna say this, snarky prompts that Windows 10 is always dishing out for you to make edge your default browser, the juiciest peach that Microsoft has to entice users to jump ship is their claim that edge offers better battery life than any other browser. But does it? In this episode of Sh** Manufacturers Say, we explore the current state of browser battery life and determine if Microsoft's claims constitute an epic mic drop, or an epic ball drop. iBuyPower and MSI's new lineup of gaming laptops feature Intel 7th generation Core i7 processors. Check them out at the link below. For our test, we used four brand new, identical Inspiron 15 7559's loaned to us by Dell. Thanks, Dell. So from the moment these landed in our office, careful attention was paid to keep them as similar to one another as possible. If Steam was installed in one machine, it had to be installed on the other three as well. So one thing we needed to know was with manufacturing tolerances in mind, just how identical are these machines? If we had a lemon, we needed to know about it. So we ran PCMark 8's home conventional battery test on each laptop twice. And although there is some variability in the test results, we consider all of them to be within the margin of error that we've come to expect from PCMark, and no machine was consistently better or worse than any of the others across the two tests. Next, we had to control our testing conditions. If one of the machines decides to update its bloatware- Cough, cough, cough. Value added pre-installed software. Thanks, Dell. Halfway through an overnight run, that's just too much pee in the punch bowl for that machine's results to be meaningful. So we uninstalled everything with Dell in the name, iced McAfee, blacked out GeForce experience, locked down Windows privacy, and politely asked Cortana to reenact her death scene at the end of Halo 4. Then, having run out of puns, we disabled telemetry, set the brightness to 50%, and set the system volume to 15%. With our machines sufficiently sanitized, we were ready to move on from synthetic tests to real-life loads, starting with Edge running on all four machines, once again to ensure consistency. So we designed our real-world test to reflect actual internet browsing, some social, a dash of news, a sprinkle of autosave, and a six-hour stream of the 4K Yule log. Pretty typical stuff for this time of year. And, wait, what? On the very first test, we had machines dying up to an hour and a half earlier than the others, even though they're all the same laptop running in identical environments with the same browser. So, we did the same test two more times and got similar results. What gives? In order to find out if the inconsistencies were due to the browser or due to the machines, we would end up needing a lot more tests. So we downloaded Chrome, Firefox, and Opera on each machine and ran test after test, rotating the browsers across the machines. And as for the results, well, there do seem to be some differences between units one to four with machine three towing the border of dead territory, but that's far from the whole story. When we ran Chrome or Opera on all four machines, they died within 20 minutes of each other. And if we compare the best and worst times of individual browsers across multiple tests on the same machine, we see that Edge just has the biggest range between its lap times. But hold on, Linus. Microsoft never claimed to have the most consistent battery life. They claimed to have the best battery life. It's a tortoise in a hare thing. Well, no, you hold on, because we're just getting started. Not only did Edge not trounce the competition in our tests, it didn't even get the high score. Chrome did. Well, hold on again, Linus, because Edge just got a huge battery life boost with the recent Windows Creators Update. And you guys didn't even use the same testing methodology that Microsoft did when they made these claims to begin with. You know what? You hold on even harder, because this project took freaking forever, and we actually did tests before and after the Creators Update. And although Edge performed very well, and not to mention much more consistently after the update, it still didn't break our longest life record. And besides, since Microsoft's testing methodology is public, well, we recreated that one too, and Edge still got beat. Gotta calm down here. It's conclusion time. So prior to the Creators Update, Edge had big winners and big losers. But since then, it's closer to the consistently good performance that we observed from Chrome. Opera is also a good choice, and it even has a battery saver mode that, well, didn't improve our life in our tests, but did improve consistency. And as for Firefox, well, it's probably not your best bet if battery life is your number one priority. So bottom line, at the time of writing, Edge no longer has, well, an edge when it comes to battery life, but Microsoft certainly deserves props for stimulating healthy competition that benefits us all. Except that is Safari people. Everyone knows they should be using a VPN to enhance their privacy online, and if you didn't know that, well, now you do. But it's so confusing, there's so many options, so just use TunnelBear. We make it simple. You download TunnelBear, you hit, like, one button, and boom! Your connection is secured, and your online activity is kept private from your internet provider, advertisers, and anyone looking to track you or profit from your data. TunnelBear has a top-rated privacy policy and does not log your activity. 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