Let the fight continue! Just after Microsoft released results of its research in a controlled environment about which browser actually conserves battery life, Opera has fired a shot back to say its browser is faster and has released its own result to this effect. According to Microsoft, its Edge browser  performed better than Firefox and Chrome up to 70 percent with respect to battery life each time you stream videos and with when you access sites like Facebook, you might be saving between 30 to 35 percent of power. This announcement comes as Microsoft is about a month away from celebrating the one year anniversary of the Windows 10 release.
In a post last month, the company says 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, 64-bit, and 35% longer than the latest version of Google Chrome (51.0.2704.103).
Opera though provided a more detailed test methodology  by simply using a Lenovo Yoga 500, 14″, i3-5005U, 4GB, 500GB HDD, Win 10 using the balanced power profile. The backlight was set to 100% all the time, Wi-Fi was running in 802.11n mode with RSSI -53 dBm. There was no other software running in the foreground; indexing and background services were stopped. Laptops were placed on a wooden surface for similar heat exchange.
The browser was automated using WinAPI event injection. For battery status information, IOCTL_BATTERY_QUERY_STATUS was used (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa372699(v=vs.85).aspx).
While we cannot verify which one works better with respect to battery life, it seems though that user may be concerned about speed. Battery life is important because of the length of time a user can continue to use their device when they are not able to charge their battery and this has an effect on overall productivity. Microsoft Edge from a user point of view is fast at least than Internet Explorer but is still not able to display some sites well. Efficiency is the word in today’s tech world. There’s a flurry of browsers which basically do the same things with the exception of some having better extensions and plugins in addition to speed. The average web browser has improved from what they used to be say about ten years ago and now it seems now that the speed with which web pages open is a fundamental, battery power efficiently is the other area companies are looking into.
Below is a stat on browsers use globally, Chrome still led that space with 57.1% and Opera coming fourth with 3.1% among the top browsers.
Paul Balo is the founder of TechBooky and a highly skilled wireless communications professional with a strong background in cloud computing, offering extensive experience in designing, implementing, and managing wireless communication systems.
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