There has been a battle between the major PC browsers and it is due to one critical issue: Battery life. Opera kick-started the browser wars with their much touted battery saver mode that made it 50% more efficient than the well known Chrome browser.
Those were bold claims made a company that is well known for its Opera mini browser which used compression to make sure that people use less data bundles than actual. Recently, Microsoft published a blogpost which detailed why you should choose Edge over the other browsers because it is way less power hungry than the other browsers. Their test involved testing Edge, Mozilla, Chrome and Opera in a video watching test on Surface Books and Edge came out the winner by a significant margin.
Since Microsoft came out with guns blazing that Edge is better than Opera, Opera decided to pen down a blogpost defending their browser. The post, hilariously named “Over the Edge” reveals how they “didn’t pay attention” to Microsoft Edge due to the fact it was only available on Windows 10. They also named Microsoft’s effort as all PR where they argued that Edge is better than the other browsers. “Like most other engineering teams, we love it when someone picks a fight,” the company said in the post, “If we get beaten in a test like this, we consider it a bug.”
This time round, Opera claims that Microsoft is not “transparent about its methodology” when it was pitting Edge and the other browsers. The company decided this time round they would be more thorough in showing their methodology which included describing the specs of their laptop, the OS, brightness level, Wi-Fi strength and also threw in a formula for calculating battery time and the detailed steps in performing the experiment.
This browser war is not yet over as the issue of battery life is still a pain for people who have older laptops. We have to wait and see what Microsoft will say about this and if Google will make significant changes to Chrome to put an end to it being the benchmark of battery hogging.