Responding to the recent tests performed by Microsoft that shwowed the low battery consumption of the Edge web browser, Opera Software claims that its own browser is better. This May, Opera shipped a dedicated battery saving feature. This feature optimizes the Chromium/Blink based browser engine and user interface in order to give users more time to browse their favorite websites. The company has waged a minor public relations campaign the last several months, supported by the new features -- the power saver and an ad-blocker .

This Monday, Microsoft released a video, similar to the one Opera had made, showing Microsoft Edge winning in their test.

Opera tried to replicate Microsoft's tests, although Microsoft hasn’t revealed its full methodology. The methodology Opera applied instead was the following: browsing a set of popular websites where the automation simulates interaction with the website.

In its own tests, Opera was run with both the battery saver and the native ad-blocker enabled. Microsoft, on the other hand, said that it had tested browsers "without any special battery saving mode or changes to the default settings," which indicated that it did not switch on either Opera's battery saver nor the ad-blocker.

An ad-blocker should result in longer battery life.

According to Opera's test:

Opera Developer (39.0.2248.0) with native ad blocker and power saver enabled is able to run 22% longer than Microsoft Edge (25.10586.0.0) on a laptop running Windows 10, 64-bit, and 35% longer than the latest version of Google Chrome (51.0.2704.103).

Opera's engineers also provided details about how the power consumption tests were performed.

"We've made significant improvements to power consumption in the past few releases, and it's an area of continued focus and investment," Google commented. "Since the beginning of the year, we've made a 33% improvement in video playback GPU/CPU [graphics processing unit/central processing unit] power consumption on Windows 10. And by Chrome 53, we feel confident that we'll be at parity with other browsers in terms of power consumption for the majority of video playback on the internet."

Google also contended that its tests -- which measure CPU and GPU power consumption -- showed that all browsers, including Edge and Chrome, depleted the battery at similar rates on Windows 10.