Opera 39 Boosts Your Laptop’s Battery Upto 50%

The latest developer version of Opera Software's browser features a power-saving mode the company said can extend a laptop's battery life by almost 50 percent, compared to previous versions of the browser as well as Google Chrome.

Opera’s tweaks include reducing background activity when tabs are minimised, bringing down CPU wake times, pausing unused plug-ins and reducing the famerate to 30fps. It even goes to extremes like using hardware acceleration for all video playback and disabling browser theme animations.

The testing has been performed on a Lenovo X250, with an Intel Core i7-5600U processor and 16 GB of RAM. That is a premium configuration, and those are the kind of devices that you can expect to reveal a dramatic difference in real-life use when switching browsers. The company says that it has timed the browsers on 11 popular websites, so your experience may vary depending on the websites that you most frequently access.

The latest build of its pre-release browser adds new power saving mode that can extend a laptop’s battery life by 50% or even more. The company claims that Opera 39 is better than today’s popular browsers. However, you can use this trick only when you activate new power saving mode which you can use when you run it on battery power.

Under normal browsing conditions, Opera said its browser saw a battery life of 1 hour 58 minutes, compared to 1 hour 54 minutes for Google Chrome. When the power-saving mode was turned on, battery life with Opera increased by 49 percent, to 2 hours 56 minutes.

Opera also stated working of new power mode in recent blog post. Some of the features of the new power mode are stated below :

Reduced activity in background tabs
Waking CPU less often due to more optimal scheduling of JavaScript timers
Automatically pausing unused plug-ins
Reduced frame rate to 30 frames per second
Tuning video-playback parameters and forcing usage of hardware accelerated video codecs
Paused animations of browser themes

The company has been quickly integrating new features in the software, including native ad-blocking and a free VPN.