Opera says Microsoft's claims about Edge battery life are wrong -- but all's not as it seems

 

The other day, Microsoft made some bold claims about the power consumption of Edge. The company claimed that its latest web browser is the most battery-friendly when compared to Chrome, Opera and Firefox. Having been beaten into third place behind Chrome, but ahead of Firefox, Opera has hit back.
 
The company says that its own tests show -- surprise, surprise -- that it is Opera which is the most efficient battery sipper. Opera says that its own battery saving feature boosts battery life by up to 50 percent when compared to Chrome. The company criticizes Microsoft for failing to reveal its methodology, accusing it of a lack of transparency. But Opera is guilty of being disingenuous, as it fails to compare like with like.
 
In a post on the Opera blog, Błażej Kaźmierczak says that the company was taken aback by Microsoft's claim. He says that when Opera was being optimized, Edge was ignored: "we didn’t pay attention [...] Microsoft Edge, mostly because [it] is only available on Windows 10". He goes on to reveal Opera's own batch of tests that show that far from being the best performing browser, Edge is actually knocked into second place.
 

 

The graph clearly shows that in Opera's test, Chrome gives 2 hours 54 minutes of battery life, Edge gives 3 hours 12 minutes, and Opera gives five minutes short of four hours. To back up its claims, there's even a video showing the methodology -- "Our test (which you can replicate) show..." -- and full details of the tests are provided:
 
 
 
This looks good for Opera, and bad for Microsoft. Opera throws down the gauntlet, saying:

If Microsoft really wants to prove that its browser performs better than others (in any regard), the company should be transparent about its methodology so that others can replicate it.

Better luck next time, Microsoft!

But Opera is not being entirely honest. In its tests, it works with Microsoft Edge (25.10586.0.0) and "the latest version of Google Chrome" (51.0.2704.103). You would expect Opera to offer up the latest version of its own browser to make for a fair test, but no. Instead, what is used is "Opera Developer (39.0.2248.0) with native ad blocker and power saver enabled".
 
So a developer version of Opera -- a version used by a small subsection of the browser's user base -- is pitted against the publicly released versions of Chrome and Edge. That hardly seems fair.
 
Play the game, Opera.
 
Photo Credit: Horoscope / Shutterstock

~ Mark Wilson

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