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Comment by stephenr | Hacker News Reader

So do the WebKit/safari teams' respective efforts to reduce power consumption not count? It seems odd that they didn't compare against safari given Apple makes a dedicated effort to reduce power consumption.

That it's a "mode" which defaults to off says a lot - the things it does aren't acceptable all of the time apparently, so you choose between features/performance, and battery life.

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Well you can't really compare Safari with Edge as they are are exclusive to different platforms.

But they could do a separate test of Opera, Safari, and Chrome on the Mac.

Opera was specifically aiming at Edge in this, it seems.

Opera was responding to something published a few days ago by Microsoft's marketing/Edge team. That's why it's directed at Edge.

It wouldn't be too hard to dual-boot Win10 on Apple hardware and compare them, but it might be a little awkward for Microsoft to do so officially.

The OS is a pretty obvious confounding factor, don't you think?

I think it would still be interesting. Win10 + Edge vs macOS + Safari.

In the end the user does not care which OS runs in the background, just which platform offers the best experience - in this case the longest battery time.

There are plenty of suitable comparisons from which one can make an educated guess. In general, Macs do better than comparable Windows machines in browsing endurance tests, and Safari clobbers every other browser it has been tested in for battery life (I have _not_ seen a comparison of Safari to this new version of Opera, but judging by its performance relative to Chrome it could be competitive with Safari).

Safari, of course, has lots of support for ad blocking short of Apple actually doing the ad blocking itself. I suspect Safari + ad blockers would be the best option across the board (it absolutely rocks on iOS devices).

Depends really. I prefer using ubuntu but win 10 + edge gives nearly double the battery life, so when I'm out and about I have to use win 10.

It is, but with the Boot Camp drivers, it seems like a fair fight. Obviously both OSes do some things behind the scenes that impact battery life, but we hope both are tuned to conserve battery when not charging. Though to turn the argument around, given that ChromeOS isn't known for wasting a lot of battery while browsing with Chrome, having less OS is probably a boon.

That wouldn't work. You don't get the same battery life out of a mac on windows as you do on macOS just sitting idle. I don't know how you would control for that.

Ok so for those who didn't quite get it - my point was that Opera are claiming to be the first 'battery saving' browser, and then completely ignore Safari in their tests.

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