Opera hits back at Microsoft claiming that Opera is better for your battery than Edge

Microsoft recently published a blog post in which they claimed that Edge on Windows 10 offered vastly superior battery life to every other browser out there. Specifically, Microsoft claimed that Edge offered 17 percent more battery life than Opera and 70 percent more battery life than Chrome. Opera took this as a challenge and decided to prove Microsoft wrong with a test of their own. Microsoft claimed to have run two tests, one in which they only streamed video and another in which they ran a script that ran through a series of websites, tabs and videos.  

This test turned on an ad blocker, which is off by default. Not loading+rendering the same content in all browsers. https://t.co/fKTWxqkUuq

— Kyle Pflug (@kylealden) June 22, 2016

Meanwhile, Opera ran their own test, the full details technical details for which have been explained in this blog post here. The main difference was that this time, Opera enabled the “battery-saver mode” on their browser, as well as the native ad-blocking functionality. Their tests indicate that Opera with battery saver and ad-block enabled is 22 percent faster than Edge and 35 percent faster than Chrome. What is clear from both tests is that Chrome is the worst browser for you, what isn’t clear is whether Opera or Microsoft is the clear winner. As the comments on Opera’s blog point out, Opera used a developer version of their browser and the fact that they enabled ad-block while browsing through ad-heavy sites gave them an “unfair” advantage over Edge. Regardless of which browser is the winner, we really doubt that most users will want to switch from the browser of their choice. Regardless of the hit to battery life, that browser is most likely to be Chrome anyway.