14 DAY TRIAL // Tests published by Microsoft a couple of days ago showed that its new Windows 10 browser provides longer battery life than all of its rivals, naming Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera as the solutions that fall behind its own Edge when it comes to efficient power usage.
Opera, however, is a company that invested big in battery saving technologies for its browser, so it decided to perform its very own tests against Edge in order to determine whether Microsoft’s new Windows 10 default is indeed more energy efficient or not.
And it turns out that it actually isn’t, as Opera’s benchmarks show that, right now, the developer version 39 leads the charts when it comes to battery life
“Opera Developer (39.0.2248.0) with native ad blocker and power saver enabled is able to run 22% longer than Microsoft Edge (25.10586.0.0) on a laptop running Windows 10, 64-bit, and 35% longer than the latest version of Google Chrome (51.0.2704.103),” the test shows.
Opera’s battery saver feature
While Microsoft didn’t offer the exact methodology it used to determine power usage of the browsers included in the benchmarks, Opera has gone for bigger transparency and explained that what it did was “browsing a set of popular websites where the automation simulates interaction with the website, making it close to what we expect normal browsing would be on such page.”
Opera’s battery saver feature, which helps reduce the power needed to browse the web, applies a series of optimizations to the application in order to improve battery life. These include reducing activity in background tabs, automatically pausing unused plug-ins, reducing frame rate to 30 fps, pausing animations in browser themes, and waking CPU less often.
Certainly, if Google decides to perform its very own benchmark to determine the most power-efficient browser, Chrome wins with flying colors, so the easy way to choose the best is simply to try them all and see which one addresses all your needs. Besides the battery saver, Opera already comes with some pretty awesome features, among which a built-in ad blocker and a VPN, so it’s definitely worth a try.
