Microsoft has initiated a battery life war with Chrome and Opera earlier this year, and Google finally responded last week. Now it;s time for Microsoft to fight back. Microsoft's original tests showed that the Chrome browser consumes more laptop battery than its own Edge web browser, but Google's response was packaged in the release of Chrome 53 with CPU and GPU power consumption enhancements for video playback.

Microsoft today presented in a blog post a comparison between the Edge and Chrome battery life on a Surface Book running the latest versions of Chrome and Edge and the Windows 10 OS (Anniversary Update installed).

Using the same Netflix test (looping a streaming video), Microsoft claims Edge lasted 8 hours and 47 mins, compared to 6 hours and 3 mins for Chrome. That's 45 percent longer than Chrome, and 69 percent longer than Firefox. The only browser that comes close is Opera with 7 hours and 8 minutes of battery life, but Edge still lasts 23 percent longer.

"The Chrome team recently released a similar video where they focused on comparing the latest version of Chrome to a release from last year to demonstrate some improvements, however they didn't include other browsers in this test," Microsoft said. "Because the format was so similar to our tests, we shot a second video to compare like for like, this time using their methodology: looping a video from Vimeo, instead of Netflix." The Vimeo test still has Edge outperforming Chrome by more than an hour, but the gap has been closed here as Edge only lasts 11 percent longer in this particular test.

In addition, Microsoft's latest statistics show that Edge power consumption is nearly half that of Google Chrome.

While Microsoft has been highlighting Chrome's poor battery performance, Google's browser is still the most popular on desktops.