A few days ago Microsoft put out a video and an article showing that its new Edge browser offered the best battery life for your mobile devices. Now, Opera, one of the browser that Edge beat in that test, is disputing the results and putting out a test of its own.
Opera says that it does not agree with Microsoft’s results and that, as any team of engineers would do, they’re accepting the Windows maker’s challenge and running the test again. Unfortunately, Microsoft did not provide the exact methodology it used to test Edge’s battery drain, so the Opera team did their own separate test.
The company ran a developer build of its own Opera browser, with all of its power-saving and ad-blocking features enabled. It pitted the browser against the likes of Chrome, the most popular browser in the world, and Edge, Microsoft’s own special baby boy. The test cycled through popular websites continuously until the device’s battery was drained.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Opera came out on top achieving just shy of 4 hours of continuous browsing time. Microsoft’s Edge came out in second place, with 3 hours and 12 minutes of browsing, while Chrome was happy to kill the device’s battery after less than 3 hours.
As a reminder, in Microsoft’s tests, which were focused on video streaming, Edge came out on top with 7 hours and 22 minutes, while Opera came in second with a score of 6 hours and 18 minutes.
So is Microsoft phased by the new results from Opera’s tests? Not at all. The company is still claiming a win, and dismissed Opera’s findings as relying on ad-blocking technology, something Microsoft did not use in its own tests.
Purists might agree with that assessment, but then again the whole point of these tests is to see which browser, overall, is better. So it wouldn’t make much sense for Opera to not rely on a feature it had introduced earlier this year.
Source: Opera