Opera's power saving mode will help laptop users increase battery life by 50 percent

Web browser experts Opera have added another handy feature that will now help laptop users save on battery life. Opera has now added a power saving mode to its developer channel that with its bag of tricks, will help desktop users of the software increase battery life by up to 50 percent; over Google’s Chrome web browser.

That bag of tricks would include a couple of tweaks that usually takes up quite a bit of power. While these would not make much of a difference on desktops, the same does have an impact on laptops where there is always an uphill battle for better battery life.

Opera’s tweaks include reducing background activity when tabs are minimised, bringing down CPU wake times, pausing unused plug-ins and reducing the famerate to 30fps. It even goes to extremes like using hardware acceleration for all video playback and disabling browser theme animations.

The company  claims that it tested its power saving mode on a Lenovo X250 and Dell XPS 13 ultrabooks running Windows 10. Running in high-performance power mode, the battery lasted about 3 hours with the power saving mode on. Turning the power saver mode off resulted in around two hours, which is the same that they achieved using Google’s Chrome browser.

Opera recently added a virtual private network toggle in the developer version of its browser. It is the first major browser to implement this feature. The VPN can be used by students or professionals who have restrictions on internet access, to get around these restrictions.