Opera Adds Power-Saving Mode, Offers 'Up To 50 Percent' Longer Battery Life

An anonymous reader writes: Opera Software has added a power-saving mode to its desktop web browser that "can increase the battery life by as much as 50 percent." The company claims optimizations are what has made the battery life increase possible, including "reducing activity from background tabs, adapting page-redrawing frequency, and tuning video-playback parameters." Opera claimed that a laptop running Windows 10 64-bit with the power-saving feature enabled lasts 49 percent longer than one with Chrome put under equal stress. Ad blocking was turned on during the test as well. The feature is not enabled by default, but a blue battery icon will appear next to the browser's address bar whenever the power cable is unplugged from your computer. When the laptop's battery is running low, the browser will suggest turning on power-saving mode, too. Earlier this week, Opera launched a new VPN app for iOS that is free to use and includes unlimited data.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

version 37 is available for linux, and packaged for a dozen distros. look at your own link again.

Re:

[NotInHere]

I didn't read TFA

At this place, this is the assumed default. I've been modded +5 informative already when all what I did was RTFA and answer some question somebody had.

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[Anonymous Coward]

all the optimizations in the world.. and yet it was the simple ad blocker, no doubt, that gave 90% of the improvement.

Re:Hmmmm...

[chipschap]

I don't know, Chrome is a real power hog ... if I run my laptop (Asus Zenbook) with no Chrome running, I get about 10 hours battery life, as compared with about 5 hours with Chrome running.

Re:

[chipschap]

Switch to Lightning [f-droid.org]

It's a decent suggestion, but you missed the part where I said "laptop" :)

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[mindmaster064]

Chrome is a power-whore. I have one of those Core M machines that sips power and can run about 10 hours on battery if nothing is running really. In this state with the screen down the whole laptop draws about 4-5 watts, but the minute you switch on Chrome 6-8 constant. It's all the phone-homing, syncing, and other stuff that is constantly running in the background that draws the power. Now this is about a 30-50% increase in use so for these types of computers this is a massive test increase in draw. I was m

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[khz6955]

I use Pale Moon, except when certain sites don't work unless noscript + flash + Java are required, which defeats the concept of safe browsing ...

When the laptop's battery is running low,

[PPH]

the browser will suggest turning on power-saving mode, too.

A bit late, IMO.

Up to any ridiculous number

[Mal-2]

And I can put this funny looking thing on the hood of your car to reduce drag and provide up to 1377% better fuel economy. Up to includes zero. It even includes negative numbers, so if all my elaborate hood ornament does is obstruct your vision and slow the car down, I still haven't made any fraudulent claims.

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[Mal-2]

OK then my one circumstance is when you attach a tow bar from the hood ornament to another vehicle and leave your car in Neutral to run the air conditioning. Somewhere in the small print it says "additional components may be required" (like an entire second vehicle) and "individual results may vary".

Ok yeah that sounds nice.

[Kellamity]

But how about first fixing the proxy server thing so when I'm using it at work I stop getting those annoying pop-ups telling me that auto update can't get through the proxy server. Either add a setting to turn off auto update or make it actually work, I'd be cool with either. Opera mini / mobile also can't handle wifi connections that require a redirect to browser signing, making them pretty much useless. Maybe I should just make my own browser. With blackjack, and hookers.

OS X Mavericks Called...

[macs4all]

From 3 years ago. It wants its System-Wide App Nap and Safari Power Saver [cnn.com] features back...

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[TheRaven64]

I was wondering how much of this is simply pulling the relevant WebKit changes into their copy of the Blink tree.

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[macs4all]

I was wondering how much of this is simply pulling the relevant WebKit changes into their copy of the Blink tree.

Well, as much as I would love to think that, I am pretty sure it is not the case.

I am pretty sure that App Nap and Safari Power Save are "private frameworks" for OS X and Safari. Remember, WebKit is only the "rendering engine" (I think); not the entire Browser; and if this was part of WebKit, I'm pretty sure the other 99% of the WebKit-Based browsers would have started to tout this "battery saving" feature by now.

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[jones_supa]

From a security perspective you are probably surprisingly safe, as nobody probably bothers to attack the Presto engine anymore. But do all websites render properly?

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[jones_supa]

Then why are you using something as impractical as that?

Have had Vivaldi installed awhile now

[Trax3001BBS]

Apparently an offering by a splinter group from Opera (keeping to the original script) yet not enough to even hint at a constant basis, Opera 12.17 is my still my favorite. https://vivaldi.com/?lang=en_U... [vivaldi.com] I thought at the time it was the latest Opera - was released just after Opera was sold.

Was a true surprise and pleasure to be able to import my Opera bookmarks, I've been collecting them for so long I have quite a list (many broken), always had to export an .adr file for Opera and an HTML to us