Battery efficiency is a major selling point of smartphones, tablets, and laptops alike, so any way to cut back on the amount of power we use to improve their charge-life is a boon. That’s what Opera is hoping will take it into new realms of popularity with its latest update, which it claims can reduce your browser’s battery drain by as much as 50 percent.
Of course this feature isn’t brand-spanking-new. We first heard about this last month when Opera released the feature in a beta state and discussed how it have managed to give as much as an extra hour of battery life to a Lenovo laptop in internal testing, versus the Chrome browser.
Now the public can test those claims itself, as the browser is officially available to the entire web-browsing world. Everyone’s results are likely to vary depending on hardware and type of usage, but judging on beta reports people should be able to expect decent battery life improvements from using the feature.
If you do give it a go, you’ll have a constant update from the browser about how much battery life you’ve saved by using it. In the “Power Saver” tab in the top right corner, there’s a breakdown of how much longer you’ll get from using it.
As much as this is a useful feature for anyone looking to browse the web on the move though, as PCWorld points out, it’s for those with older hardware where it could be particularly useful. Anyone running years-old hardware is likely to have a pretty inefficient system compared to something contemporary, which, in turn, means poor battery life.
They are also underpowered compared to modern systems, and thanks to the way the battery saver feature tweaks CPU usage across tabs, Opera’s latest browser release is said to perform far better too, only rendering tabs and engaging the CPU when necessary.
So not only can the new version of Opera keep your hardware running for longer, but for those with older systems, it might actually make your web browsing experience much more pleasurable.
If you’d like to try the feature out, you can download the browser straight from Opera.
