Modern laptops have now arrived at a point where pretty much anything you purchase is going to offer enough power to handle web browsing, media streaming and basic work without any problems — unless it’s really a budget machine. Modern processors and graphics chips are nice and powerful, and most software from big-name developers is pretty well-optimized. With that in mind, battery life becomes an increasingly important piece of the puzzle when people are choosing a new laptop. What you might not realize, however, is that battery performance is about much more than just hardware.
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There’s a new type of web browser war going on right now, and the end result is nothing but big benefits for you, the end user. It started with Opera making the bold claim that by switching to its browser of the same name on your laptop would increase your battery life by a whopping 50%. That’s a bold claim, and testing from independent sources found that the Opera browser did indeed have a big impact on battery life.
Then more recently, Microsoft jumped into the fray and said that its new Edge browser offers even more benefits where battery life is concerned. A video posted alongside its claims showed Edge outperforming Opera, Chrome and Firefox in battery longevity tests.
Needless to say, Opera wasn’t going to take Microsoft’s claims sitting down. And new the company is back with a new blog post explaining that Opera does indeed offer better battery life than Microsoft’s Edge browser.
Opera explained that it didn’t even include Edge in its earlier comparisons because the browser is only available on Windows 10. Following Microsoft’s new claims though, the company decided to respond.
“Like most other engineering teams, we love it when someone picks a fight,” Opera’s Błażej Kaźmierczak wrote in a blog post. “If we get beaten in a test like this, we consider it a bug.”
He continued, “our first step was to see if it actually is the case that ‘Edge gives longer battery time than Opera’? As Microsoft hasn’t revealed its full methodology, we were unable to run the same tests. The methodology we applied instead was exactly the same as we provided before: 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.”
Here are the results of Opera’s testing:
Opera’s full post is an interesting read, and the company says that its browser is the clear winner over Edge. If you still don’t want to ditch Chrome for either of these rival browsers though, there are two important things you should note: first, there are ways to speed up the Chrome browser and some of them have the added benefit of reducing battery drain. Second, you can be sure that Google engineers are already hard at work following this new round of interest in battery life, and future versions of Chrome will likely offer big improvements in this area.
