IE 10 for the Energy Win?

According to the recent report released by Microsoft, their new Internet Explorer 10 is the most energy efficient browser. According to the tests run by the Center for Sustainable Energy Systems, in comparison to other browsers tested on the Windows 8 system, which include other big names like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, IE 10 uses about 18% less energy. 

When running the browsers through multiple tests on some of the more popular sites in the US, including testing them on Adobe Flash and HTML 5 video content, less power was consumed with IE. The article states “The 18% savings in energy consumption is significant. Consider that if every Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox user in the United States used Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8  for a year, they would save over 120 million kWh in electricity!” Of course this was reported on World Environment Day, and they went on to claim “This means that if every Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox user in the United States switched to Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 for a year, the energy saved could power over 10,000 households in the United States for that year.” Of course, this is reminiscent of the similar results from the test in 2011, where IE 9 was also declared the most efficient.

I like how Frederic Lardinois over at Tech Crunch states it when he writes, “Let’s face it, when you think about browsers, the last thing you think about is how much power they consume. Indeed, this sounds like a pretty unusual question to ask, but given that we probably spend more time browsing the web than doing anything else on our laptops, using about 18 percent less energy, as the study claims IE does, could make a difference.”

My opinion of all of this? For many years now I have despised Microsoft’s IE browser, regardless of the edition. As a web designer by trade, I find IE to be the most frustrating browser to code for, and one of the only ones that almost always require some kind of special code or hack to be implemented in order to get a site to look proper in them. Their coding structure always seems to be years behind the competition, requiring older code to be used, and attempting to use newer, cutting edge CSS/HTML coding features which tend to cause IE problems. That means that instead of being able to use hot new CSS features (when I say new, that usually means code from the past year or two), you either have to abandon the idea, or write two sets of codes for two different types of visitors – those with the IE handicap, and the rest of the world.

I still install new versions for testing purposes, and for years my wife has used it on our computer just so as not to have to share my preferred browsers. When IE 10 upgraded, she found that clicking a link that opened a new tab, the new tabs would not work. The tab appears, but nothing loads, and it was very frustrating. I quickly did a search on the web, and found forums where others were having the same issue. So, one of the main functions that browsers have used for a few years now is broken or requires hoops be jumped through to make it work on a fairly new computer.

So, while there may be less energy use, the time spent getting the job done will be increased, as well as the frustration. Of course, I was not surprised to find I am not alone in this. Within just the first few hours after it was posted, the Tech Crunch article garnered over 200 comments, with very few positive comments towards IE. Everything from laughter at the idea of using IE, to other smart-mouth comments like “If everybody switched from IE to Chrome and Firefox, and from windows to Linux, we could save enough anti-depressant pills to treat 10,000 psychic patients,” or “How much energy would be needed to power the developers computers that would need to rewrite hundreds of lines of code to make websites work in IE just as well as FF and Chrome?”

There was one comment, a rather lengthy one that made many good points. He basically says that due to so many people still using IE as it is, it costs more for the development side (especially on the web side as already mentioned) and ends up costing more in time, speed and bandwidth overall. Because it won’t use the latest coding technology, it requires additional or slower code to be used by designers for IE compliance. That requires more coding time on the back-end, which then takes longer to read and load the larger file sizes, and which results in consuming more bandwidth to move the bulky code. In the end, he blames Microsoft for dragging much of the population down and keeping the internet behind where it could be if people would abandon IE altogether.

While this may not be directly related to helping you find a position in the tech industry, hopefully it will cause you to consider the type of tech you personally use. As someone seeking to be in the industry, hopefully you desire to be on the cutting edge of things, and therefore should be aware of how your personal usage may be impacting not only your system, but the whole tech industry in general – in this case, keeping the internet chained down due to less than efficient tech.

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net