Opera is now 50% more efficient than Chrome thanks to its power saving mode

Opera is on a roll. The company which is famous for its desktop and mobile browsers announced a very cool mode on its developer browser: Power saving mode.

One of the core uses for laptops is browsing the web and people use various browsers depending on their taste. Chrome has gained traction over time thanks to its fast loading times and its brutal simplicity, but has gained notoriety over bad battery life and being a general RAM hog. Now, Opera has decided to take a swing at them where they claim that their new dedicated power saving mode can “extend your laptop battery life by up to 50% when you compare with, for example, Google Chrome.”

So how were they able to do this? Well they asked their browser engine team to tune the browser to make sure people more browsing hours. They ended up making several optimizations like reduced CPU wakes, reduced background tab activity, pausing unused plugins, reduced the frame rate to 30fps and tuned video playback.

The company then decided to do a variety of tests which involved loading 11 popular websites in separate tabs and each was scrolled 5 times and it was repeated until the laptop ran out of juice. This is what they found out:

These claims were quite interesting and naturally, I downloaded the Opera Developer browser to substantiate the claims and I noticed immediately after enabling power saving mode, the laptop was using significantly way less power than Chrome.  However when I logged in on YouTube, the power draw seemed to be just in line with Chrome. When you are doing basic web browsing, this power saving feature is a must to be on (activated on settings) and coupled with their ad block and unlimited VPN, I think I’ve found my daily driver browser.