Opera's new battery saver feature is today ready in the stable version of Opera browser for computers.
Opera claims that battery saver feature is able to increase the battery life of your laptop by as much as 50% comparing to other browsers, such as Google Chrome.
If something consumes more energy, it usually gets warmer. That’s why a laptop gets overheated during heavy browsing sessions. Opera made tests comparing the temperature of bottoms of two laptops. One was running Opera with battery saver enabled and the other one Opera with the mode disabled. Test results with the new battery saver enabled showed that Opera can keep laptops over 3 degrees °C cooler.
Opera says it has achived this cool down and power savings by:
- Reducing activity in background tabs
- Waking CPU less often due to optimal scheduling of JavaScript timers
- Automatically pausing unused plug-ins
- Reducing frame rate to 30 frames per second
- Tuning video-playback parameters and forcing usage of hardware accelerated video codecs
- Pausing animations of browser themes
- Including ad blocker - when enabled, it enables even more battery savings
Other new things in Opera 38
- Ad blocker - add your own lists. You can add your own block lists.
- Speed Dial improvements. Now, you don’t need to worry that you removed a website from your Speed Dial accidentally. You’ll now notice three little dots on hover in place of where the delete button used to be. The new button provides quick access to the features previously only available in the context menu, like opening in private window, or removing a website from your Speed Dial.
- Add your own photo as theme. The "Create your theme" option in the theme manager is now more visible for you.
- Extension button visible in the Speed Dial side panel.
- Change in version support for OS X. Starting from this version, the Opera browser is supporting OS X 10.9 and higher.