On World Environment Day, we are proud to announce that Internet Explorer continues to be the most energy-efficient browser on Windows 8, according to the Center for Sustainable Energy Systems at Fraunhofer USA. When compared to Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer uses up to 18% less energy. 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.

Fraunhofer USA Inc. tested Internet Explorer 10, Google Chrome 26 and Mozilla Firefox 21 for their energy consumption on Windows 8. For their study, researchers tested the browsers on desktop and laptop computers in several common scenarios including:

· Browsing the most popular websites in the United States.

· Playing video content through Adobe Flash.

· Playing video content through HTML5 video.

In the above scenarios, Internet Explorer 10 exhibited the lowest energy consumption. In some scenarios such as playing Adobe Flash video on laptop PCs, it was 18% more energy efficient than Google Chrome, and it was 17% more efficient than Mozilla Firefox in playing HTML5 video.

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!

^- This is enough energy to power 10,722 households in the United States for an entire year.¹

- This would eliminate the release of over  85,000 metric tons of Carbon Dioxide equivalent in greenhouse gas emissions.²

- This is the equivalent of reducing greenhouse emissions by consuming nearly 10 million less gallons of gasoline.

- This is equivalent to the carbon dioxide removed by growing nearly 2.2 million tree seedlings for 10 years.

Power consumption is an important, but often overlooked, consideration in building a modern browser. It is one of our objectives to lead the industry in power requirements because the more efficiently a browser uses power, the longer a user can enjoy the Web on a PC, the lower the electricity costs and the smaller the environmental impact.

Keeping this in mind, we follow several principles to lower power consumption with Internet Explorer:

· We focus on making Internet Explorer fast because the quicker a browser can perform an action, the less the power it will consume.

· We tap into modern PC hardware to accelerate Internet Explorer rendering because using the native graphics hardware decreases power consumption.

Every year, the World Environment Day campaign urges us to do our part and see the power of our collective actions on the environment. As computing becomes more mobile, the Internet more prevalent and an HTML5-based Web more pervasive, it’s important to remember that the browsers we use can have an impact on the environment. We encourage everyone – the industry, browser vendors, and users – to join us in decreasing our energy footprint.

Roger Capriotti

Director, Internet Explorer Marketing

Notes:

1. Average annual electricity consumption for a US residential utility customers was 11,280kWh

2. From US Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator