Each month it appears that the Opera browser is becoming more compelling.
Opera, which appears to be determined to put generations of improvements into just a short period, boasts one more reason for users to switch to using its browser: a new low-power mode that the business has promised extends the battery life of a laptop by as much as 50%.
Like many other recent Opera releases, the new feature appears first as part of their developer edition of it Opera 39 browser for both Windows and Mac.
That feature seems to help the new mode of low-power to achieve the best results. The company says that during internal testing of this it gained another hour of battery life while operating its browser on a Dell XPS Core i7 based 13 with RAM of 16MB, and powered by a Windows 10 64-bit version.
Ad blocking had been enabled, said the company.
The battery life claims by Opera show that it used the automated browser Selenium to test 11 websites using tasks such as scrolling down, adding tabs, letting it sit for a few minutes and then repeating the same cycle until the battery ran out of power.
Opera is receiving a great deal of attention of late, as it appears browsers once again matter. Much of that is due to Opera’s massive number of improvements, in addition to its recent ad blocker, Opera rallied users who are privacy-minded with an unlimited, native VPN built into its browser.
Microsoft is tying digital assistant Cortana to its own Edge browser and is reminding its users that features that are plug-in-like such as finding coupons, are built in.
Then there is Vivaldi, the new browser from Chronium from former employees at Opera.
Opera’s low-power mode has a large icon of a battery that signals it is in use. Users can also switch it on and off from the Settings menu.
To preserve the power in the low-power mode, the company says parts of the code of the browser were simplified, and animated themes were optimized.
In addition, improvements were made to lowering activity in tabs in the background, adapting the frequency of page-redrawing and tuning the parameters of video-playback, said company officials.
Opera released a statement that said in the new version it is testing a smarter way to manage memory, which will ensure that tabs that are constantly opened such as Facebook or Yahoo will be far more responsive.
