Opera team claims their browser is more battery efficient than Microsoft Edge

https://youtu.be/rjrxOOfi54k

On Monday, Microsoft highlighted on their blog that Microsoft Edge is the most power efficient web browser on Windows 10. To prove their claim, they connected a Surface Book to specialized power monitoring equipment and measured the actual power usage during typical browsing activities in the latest stable versions of Microsoft Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. They automated each browser to perform the same series of activities like opening websites, scrolling through articles, and watching videos, opening new tabs for each task. They also used the same websites like Facebook, Google, YouTube, Amazon, Wikipedia and more.

Looks like Opera team is not happy with the way Microsoft did these tests. Today, they posted a blog post claiming that Opera is the most power efficient browser when compared to Microsoft Edge. They prepared their own testing mechanism and concluded that 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.

They loaded chicagotribune.com, elitedaily.com, faz.net, latimes.com, mashable.com, mlive.com, nj.com, nydailynews.com and youtube.com/watch?v=tnsQ8DjD6YE – in separate tabs.

Kyle Pflug from Microsoft Edge team responded to Opera’s claims that they did not turn on the Ad blocker feature in Opera which will significantly affect battery life numbers .

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

Our tests did include Battery Saver mode turned on, but loaded and rendered the same content in each browser.

— Kyle Pflug (@kylealden) June 22, 2016