Opera’s new Saver Mode helps users extend laptop battery life

Founder & Editor-in-Chief

June 9, 2016

Laptop owners who browse the internet often usually complain that their batteries are draining pretty fast, even if they’re only browsing a few websites. Many have ditched Opera in favor of other web browsers, thinking that they will save more battery power, but haven’t gotten the desired results. Hopefully, Opera Software’s just introduced saver mode for its web browser will allow laptops to be 3°C cooler and enjoy better battery life as a result.

Opera’s Vice President of Engineering Services, Pawel Miniewicz, knows that “Running out of battery is one of the most frustrating things that can happen to you while browsing,” and he understands how annoyed users are when they travel and want to surf the web, but forget to bring their charger. “Luckily, since people spend almost all their time in their web browser and relatively speaking little time in other desktop applications, this is something we can do something about,” he added in a blog on the organization’s website.

The new battery saver integrated into the Opera web browser was tested on a Lenovo X250 sporting a Core i7-5600U processor with 16GB of RAM and a Dell XPS 13 with 16GB of RAM running on Windows 10 64-bit. The tester opened 11 popular websites including YouTube and the results, obtained by Selenium WebDriver, showed that the each of the laptop’s batteries lasted 50 percent longer.

Opera made this possible “without compromising the speed and functionality you expect,” as the power savings are gained reducing non-essential system tasks. This battery saving mode can be enabled by hitting the battery icon that is located next to the address bar which appears only when the cable is unplugged. We suggest you to enable this mode when your battery has 20% or less left.

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