Your Browser Tests Are BS — Opera to Microsoft

There’s no word yet on if Personal Shopping Assistant will be released as an extension for the Microsoft Edge browser. The video puts Edge up against Chrome, Firefox, and Opera in web video battery run down tests (all running on Surface Books). “If we get beaten in a test like this, we consider it a bug”, wrote says Blazej Kazmierczak, director of software development at Opera, on its blog. The company used a Surface Book device, and showed how long it lasts when each browser is run on it. The problem with that is that we don’t know exactly just how much Edge was optimized to work on that specific device.

Opera has criticized Microsoft’s pre-mature attempt to display its superior power-saving ability, as the test did not specifically outline details on how it was conducted and on what terms.

It appears that Microsoft’s Edge browser is at the center of attention for many developers nowadays, with many rolling out a series of interesting extensions to Edge, improving the user experience and making the browser more appealing to potential users.

In what Microsoft called a Microsoft Edge Experiment its own browser came out smelling of roses when pitted against Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera. In the Opera test, Opera lasted 22 per cent longer than Edge.

Regardless, I take Microsoft’s claims at face value: “These numbers from actual Windows 10 (version 1511) use ‘in the wild, ‘ not artificial tests or hypotheses”.

Also, Flash is now being placed under energy consumption observation. Scrolling activity was simulated, as well. This is significant, because ads can add a significant amount of processing when a website is loaded.

This is very useful, especially if you are caught in a website adware loop that requires you to jump three or four pages behind. The main difference was that this time, Opera enabled the “battery-saver mode” on their browser, as well as the native ad-blocking functionality.

Of course, the next stage was to run its own tests, which proved fairly conclusively that Opera, with the battery mode set to stun, kept on for 43 more minutes, clocking in an impressive 3hrs 55mins.