Today, we are sharing with you yet another feature to try out in the developer channel for Opera for computers.
We are the first major browser to include a dedicated power saving mode, designed to extend your laptop battery life by up to 50% compared with, for example, Google Chrome. Depending on your type of hardware, it can mean several hours more browsing before you need to recharge your laptop.
Very interesting feature – but I’ll be interested in real-world tests and benchmarks.
For taking care of our Planet.
I have been a Opera user since version 6 and also loved the integrated mail app. Opera was the only closed source software on my pc for quite a while. When they stopped development I learned from it and decided to not have a proprietary browser again. No way to open source it?
Opera 12. They were asked to open Presto, but since there is still some legal use of it (say Nintendo Wii) I guess they cannot. And I bet they are not going to shoot themselves in the foot by providing an open competitor to their closed source browser.
Latest presto release was in 2015 for opera mini. so it is still being updated somewhat.
I really hope they make it possible to have native scrollbars and most of all native window borders ina unaccelerated desktop. The ugly blue window border when using over rdesktop is really ugly.
I stopped using Opera once I learned about the acquisition by that dodgy Chinese company.
I miss Opera Mini a lot, but what can you do. Hoping Vivaldi might address this somehow, sometime.
I tried it for 5 days, after Chrome, on a Mac. Doesn’t feel any faster, and the included Adblock doesn’t block everything. I just went back to Firefox, with uBlock Origin, and it actually feels faster than Opera (Is it my perception?)
I hardly can think on “battery saving” and improved performance at the same time.
Battery saving commonly implies having less priority for CPU-intensive tasks, implies having less watchdogs, executing the stuff slowly, using just one core in a multicore system, dimming out the screen lights or stopping the JS execution of applications on inactive tabs.
None of those features useful to improve battery life would make your system faster.
Edited 2016-05-13 15:03 UTC
Power saving wouldn’t make the browser faster, but it could very well free resources for all other processes. Having Firefox eating 30% cpu and 3gb memory while idling in the background gets old fast.
Actually you’re right, I am just basically back on Chrome with uBlock Origin…
Hi,
Combining time-outs that expire at roughly the same time helps power saving by waking CPU/s up less often, but also helps performance by reducing the “per hardware timer IRQ” overhead.
Running background pages’ javascript bloatware slower (at lower priority) helps power saving, and also makes the pages in the foreground that the user is actually using perform better (because the CPUs are doing less other work and can do more useful work).
Blocking adverts is another thing that improves both power consumption and performance.
– Brendan
Not to mention your safety. Drive-by ad attacks are getting seriously nasty these days and allowing only “trustworthy” advertising is no defense since they’ve been compromised, too. I won’t turn my ad blocker off for anyone until these ad networks start taking security seriously.