Squeezing every last minute of available battery is an obligation for all laptop users, and any advantage they can get is undoubtedly welcome. Now, it is none other than Opera that promises up to 50 percent extra battery life thanks to a new power saving mode included in the latest developer version of its browser.
Opera Keeps Innovating
The people behind Opera have made some development decisions that are slowly setting their product apart from the rest, even though it is based on Chromium code. Almost all specialized media reported the novelty that Opera has a free integrated VPN service, so users can browse the web with more privacy and also avoid geographic blocks. The benefit requires using development builds, so all our adventurous readers should tread carefully if they do critical work on this browser. But now Opera has decided to address a very sensitive topic: battery life.
How Does the Power Saving Mode Work?
How can a web browser consume more battery? The first thing that comes to mind is when it prevents the processor from entering deeper power-saving modes, and from what we can interpret from the official announcement, that is what the new “battery saver” in Opera aims at. In addition to “waking” the processor less frequently through optimizations in timers of JavaScript, it also reduces the activity of background tabs, pauses any plugin that is not being used, reduces the general “framerate” of the browser to 30 FPS, stops animations in available “themes”, and tries to force the use of hardware acceleration in video playback whenever possible. Opera indicates improvements of up to 50 percent in battery life compared to the stable version of Chrome, on Lenovo X250 and Dell XPS 13 computers running Windows 10 x64.
Of course, the final savings will depend on each environment and each session, but Opera insists that these optimizations should not negatively affect the browsing experience. Along with the new power saving mode, changes to the VPN were also announced, and the most important is the complete deactivation of WebRTC when browsing under VPN.
