Microsoft started talking up the speed of its new Internet Explorer 9 Web browser long before its official global release on March 14. Now the software giant is claiming that IE9 is also the best Web browser on the market for saving energy.

Microsoft recently conducted several tests with IE9 that allegedly support the company’s claim that its browser consumes less power than Chrome 10, Firefox 4, Safari 5, and Opera 10.

The tests were conducted on a laptop computer running Windows 7 and various scenarios were executed to measure the power usage of various PC components, including CPU, GPU, GMCH, Memory, Uncore, Hard Disk, Network, USB and others. The tests were used to determine the effect that the power usage of the components would have on the life of the laptop’s battery.

The scenarios included performing a baseline test without any browsers running, navigating to about:blank, loading a popular news website, running HTML5 Galactic and running FishIE. The tests were designed to reveal a browser’s power consumption during typical Web-browsing situations.

According to the tests, IE9 came in first with a “Web Browser Impact on Battery Performance” of 3 hours, 45 minutes. Firefox 4 was a close second at 3:35, Chrome 10 and Safari 5 were deadlocked at 2:56 and 2:55, respectively, and Opera, the least-green browser, clocked in at 2:43.

That doesn’t mean that IE9 beat the competition in every scenario, though. In fact, the Microsoft browser came in dead last in two of the five scenarios for determining battery life — the about:blank scenario, which measured battery performance when browsers were up and running but not actually browsing the Web, and the news site scenario, which measured the battery performance of browsers as they performed common HTML4 tasks.

Sources

Microsoft Developer Network Blogs, Internet Explorer Blog, “Browser Power Consumption — Leading the Industry with Internet Explorer 9.”

Mashable website, “Microsoft Says Internet Explorer 9 Is the Most Energy-Efficient Browser.”