Opera Isn’t Happy With Edge Battery Claims

When it comes to buying a new laptop or tablet, battery life is important to many. A few extra hours can make all the difference between it being a great laptop or an okay one. Something that your laptop’s battery may also be decided by is what software it runs, with the key piece of software being your web browser. Recently Microsoft claimed that Edge, their latest browser, was the best browser for battery life, a claim that Opera are keen to argue about.

Blazej Kazmierczak is the director of Software development for Opera’s desktop browser and in a blog post on Wednesday, it was clear the company didn’t quite agree that this test would last long. Kazmierczak stated that they “love it when someone picks a fight. If we get beaten in a test like this, we consider it a bug”.

Following a similar pattern to Microsoft’s test, Opera conducted a similar test using an automated pattern of web browsing in the hopes of replicating what an actual person would do. With Opera recently being upgraded with to include both a native ad blocker and enhanced power saving options (both of which have to be enabled by the user), the new tests saw these featured enabled and showed a little discrepancy between their own and Microsoft results, with Edge lasting 3 hours 12 minutes while Opera and its enhanced battery feature last 3 hours and 55 minutes.

Opera detailed their methodology, something that Microsoft didn’t reveal and are being challenged on by Opera. Which browser do you use? Does it eat up your battery? Would you change your browser if it meant an extra hour on Netflix?