Introducing power saving mode in Opera for computers | Hacker News Reader

Introducing power saving mode in Opera for computers

opera.com

92 pointshochmartinez81 comments

> We are the first major browser to include a dedicated power saving mode

Isn't that because the one prime power-saving browser (Safari) is simply power-saving by default? AFAIK it's the same story on Windows (with Edge).

Chrome is well known for being an all-power-consuming monster, having better power consumption than Chrome is hardly an achievement.

There's also Firefox (I don't know much about Firefox power consumption. )

One large factor is forcing the system to tick every millisecond instead of every 15.6 milliseconds, which both Firefox and Chrome are currently doing on my computer.

Is there any way to make Windows ignore those requests?

Didn't Windows 8 move to a tickless kernel in which that setting no longer has any effect?

EDIT: Yes: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/better...

Tickless by itself doesn't guarantee that the system won't be woken up periodically by an application timer. It simply guarantees that the system won't wake up needlessly if there are no timers to serve.

Timer coalescing, which I believe Windows also implement, does help by both setting a minium resolution to timer frequency and making sure that timers wake up in batches.

edit: spelling

Sure, but it gets rid of the overhead that reducing system timer resolution to 1 ms has which was there even if there weren't any timers running.

On Windows at least it looks like it’s considerably better than Chrome but less good than Edge / IE: http://www.digitalcitizen.life/test-comparison-which-browser...

> All the web browsers used their default configuration, without any add-ons or toolbars installed.

My raw, untested guess is that using Firefox with some strict adblocking/flashblocking etc. tools might reduce its power usage due to less HTTP requests, less CPU/GPU time wasted (though OTOH the add-ons may increase the CPU load to do their job, so it's non-obvious).

It's particularly telling that they don't compare against Safari at all. I've found it to beat Chrome by more than 50%.

Is that with a reasonable (~10) or unreasonable (~300) number of tabs open?

(Disclaimer: anecdata.)

Unreasonable, for sure. I may not be in the several hundreds of tabs open at any given time, but definitely around a hundred. I gave up on Chrome for this specific reason, it'd just kill my battery in no time, whereas I can go an entire work day with Safari and still have battery left for an episode of SV. I routinely have ridiculous amounts of tabs open (for no good reasons) and Safari so far has been the only browser able to cope without draining my battery in no time.

My main reason for ditching Chrome in favor of Safari, aside from the fact that Safari is ridiculously fast, is that Chrome is a memory hog. The way I browse, with so many tabs open and lots of flipping back and forth, Chrome routinely eats around 4gb of memory in total, whereas Safari uses somewhere in the vicinity of 50%-75% of that. (Looking at it right now, it's at 1.86gb.)

I don't think Safari is the perfect browser by any means, but it's the best one I've used so far.

A classic example of finding a technical solution to a human problem. If you have a hundred tabs open, you're problem is the hundred tabs and not your browser.

Why?

I open up a lot of tabs while researching things, and once I have found my solution, I can either review the rest of the tabs or close the window.

So what is the human problem with having many tabs exactly?

Honestly, Chromes UI for lots of tabs sucks as well. Safari has multiple allowances for it and never shrinks tabs down into a tiny, useless state[1] nor does Safari have a tab limit.

Frankly, Chrome sucks with a lot of tabs and sucks at conserving power, on a laptop it loses out on the two things that actually matter to me.

[1] https://imgur.com/bZTgrCg

No argument there, I use safari both for tab sanity and low battery use, I just don't get the hate for people using many tabs.

They're basically stacks of mini bookmarks in my view.

Many tabs is not a hundred tabs. You can't really manage a hundred tabs. Try using bookmarks and a search engine.

I have a similar use pattern, and the short answer is: it isn't worth bookmarking. I (we?) are reading a lot and evaluating if it's even worth keeping. Once I've decided if it's worth keeping then yes, I will bookmark. But first I have to scan through the bunch of documents/pages/topics I have opened and see if they're of any use.

Tabs can be managed easily, I close them when I'm done.

Bookmarks are long-term memory, tabs are short-term memory.

I tried that, but it ended up just being a dump of oh so many bookmarks and I'd spend more time searching, finding all sorts of interesting stuff in my dumps of bookmarks, open those up, and then all of a sudden I'm back to having loads and loads of tabs open.

Seriously, I'm like a tab addict. I need help.

It would be great if browsers had an option to only allow one instance of a certain website. Half my problem is opening multiple tabs of gmail, whatsapp and facebook, for example, when i'm only actually looking for one instance of them.

Pinnes tabs solve that, actually. Whenever I hit a Facebook link or whatever it just switches to and navigates the Facebook tab to the URL. This is an awesome feature and probably singelhandedly responsible for cutting my tab count by the tens anyway. Still not enough, but definitely a step in the right direction.

Do you mean pinned tabs? It doesn't switch to the existing tab for me on chrome with osx. In what environment does this work because I'm very interested in it.

Oh sorry, I meant in Safari. Pinned tabs in Chrome was the killer feature that kept me around. When Safari finally got them I switched in a heart beat and haven't looked back since. (Other than for dev.)

I manage 100 tabs and use vimium to search through them. I like this workflow and it's productive. I could close them and manage a bunch of bookmarks, but I find this is better for me.

I do almost the same as you, but with Firefox under Windows. A year ago I had to switch to the beta channel because the memory leaks in the "satble" version would crash it on restart (I have it configured to reload the previous session).

A few months later problems began with beta version. Things got nasty when they tried the multiprocess architecture (which luckily has disappeared for good). Now (v 47) they've found a sweet spot.

I have also slightly modified my usage patterns to mitigate the problem:

* I would open one "main page" (HN, for example) and keep that open, refreshing and loading tabs in that window related to news, discussions, posts, etc. I'd never close this tab/window. -> (what I suspect) this would cause FF to keep hundreds (thousands?) of URLs and state in memory to respond to the Shift+T (reopen tab) command.

* I now close the "main window" more often, and thus keep this behaviour at bay. This alone must be the one thing that impacted the browsers stability.

* I try to keep less than 6 windows open at the same time (one with my email accounts, facebook main page, etc, another one for reddit/HN, and then specific windows for different topics).

I haven't had to modify my habits any further fortunately. But I did use to have 20+ windows with ~20 tabs each in average.

You seem to be getting down voted, but honestly I agree with you. If there was an option to limit the amount of tabs I can have open, I totally would use it and limit it all to 10, maybe even just 5. Thing is, this isn't so much a conscious choice – it just happens!

I read something, there's an interesting link. I open a tab in the background and continue reading. Maybe I go back to the tab, find a couple more interesting links and open those in the background. Of course, there's also the link that's so obviously just bait, but I'm a weak man so I click it, then feel bad, like I just had a whole big bag of candy on my own or something. Anyway, rinse and repeat and hey presto – 150 tabs are open in no time.

I fundamentally agree with you, but I'm like a chain smoker, except my vice is the humble HTML anchor...

I tend to have the same browsing habits and it was a huge drain on my resources until I started using OneTab. It's a Chrome extension that saves all your tabs on a window and lets you reopen them all at once or one at a time whenever.

If you're still using Chrome give it a shot & hopefully it helps! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...

I used to do something similar. Nowadays I put stuff I want to read into <insert fav read later service> and read them later if I'm not going to do it right away.

Rule number 1 for the interaction between humans and the computer is to never blame the user. Humans are the way they are and hard to change, you are programming for them, so you need to take into account how they use your program. If you provide tabs, they will leave tons of tabs open.

A classic example of blaming the human for wanting what they want, when there's no particular reason not to give it to them.

It's 2016. My 3GHz 6-core computer with 32GB of RAM should be able to handle a thousand tabs without even noticing it.

Classic Opera could have twice the tabs in 2 GB of RAM and it ran fine.

With only a few tens of tabs. Certainly less than 30.

> having better power consumption than Chrome is hardly an achievement

Considering Opera is now based on Chromium, and Google didn't achieve this on its own, I'd say it does deserve some credit.

I think the OP meant that Chrome is known for not caring about memory/CPU usage, so if you do any effort, you will improve.

IMHO 50% improvement (if it's real) is a very respectable improvement.

> first

explorer 9 disagrees.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/159269-internet-explore...

Safari says hi as well

http://www.imore.com/os-x-mavericks-preview-safari-power-sav...

G chrome has a 'power multiplier' that you can turn on by clicking the red multiplication sign next to each open tab

They aren't comparing apples with apples. Ad blocking is only enabled in the power saving mode. This alone would save a lot of CPU. IMO they should show a comparison with ad blocking enabled in both situations.

Does anyone know how different is power management of Chrome on ChromeOS from Chrome on other OSes? Chromebooks are known for long battery life is that because of power management or is there more in this?

Minimal hardware + even more minimal software stack means that there's little except Chrome that can drain power. That already helps a lot.

Chrome should add such a mode, too. Power consumption is a big concern for laptop users.

Why don't you just make low power consumption a permanent feature?

Because not everyone uses a battery powered device.

Even if power use is a minor concern for desktops, it would be good to program with energy consumption in mind :>

Network utilization, CPU usage, memory, disk usage, energy consumption. Lots to focus on...

"Longer battery life" can be restated as: a lower ambient temperature for your room/office; less CPU cooler fan noise; a lower power bill; the ability to pack more servers per rack in a co-lo environment (yes, servers run browsers–headless ones, for spidering/scraping); etc. It can even be restated in terms of extra performance, when you consider technologies like Intel's Turbo Boost.

I would expect that lower power use is highly correlated to low CPU/GPU use, which can be beneficial for other reasons than reducing power use.

It's really frustrating how much the web, software, and computers in general are being gimped for everyone just to support the "mobile" segment of the market.

Nothing is being "gimped" for the benefit of laptops, and paying attention to power consumption (direct or indirect) benefits pretty much everything.

Sometimes I try to squeeze more battery time from my old laptop, and I look for processes hogging the cpu. Invariably I see Firefox consuming 30-40% cpus and I have to hunt down those misbihaving tabs that, even idle, keep the cpu awake.

The reality is that today saving power matters everywhere. On mobile and laptops means a longer lasting battery and/or lighter device; on a desktop and laptop it means a quieter machine; on the datacenter, power usage is probably the most important cost today.

Even on desktops or when laptops are plugged in we should concern ourselves with power usage. If something can be optimized for power usage, it should be.

Electricity isn't free.

Often there are tradeoffs. E.g. when I put my phone in powersaving mode the dimmed screen is very hard to read in bright sunlight. My browser not processing background tabs might be a useful feature sometimes, but when I'm listening to music on Youtube it would be a real inconvenience.

Desktop Safari doesn't have a 'power saving mode' and it consumer less power than Chrome. Apparently MS Edge is the same (I don't use Windows so I can't know). These browsers don't have user-visible tradeoffs, they're just more power efficient.

Or is this just a case of Chrome being really really unoptimised and power hungry?

I have no idea about specific browser implementations. I know I perceive Safari and Edge as less responsive than Chrome, which could easily be due to tradeoffs they make for power consumption.

Exactly. I recently discovered that my iPhone on battery-saving mode is awesome, and now I put it on that mode even when its 100%, so it holds longer. Everything works fine. I havent found anything wrong. Apple should mak that mode the default mode. Battery-saving mode should be default on all things.

There are of course things like screen brightness or gaming performance that dont mix well with the above, but thats fine. Leave the brightness alone, and resume the battery-saving mode after the game is closed.

So basically, default mode should be battery-saving mode. Performance mode should be used automatically when a fame or something is running. And make a new battery-saving mode which is the default mode plus the low brightness, no games, no wifi, no whatever mode.

Am I missing something?

It does a lot more than lower brightness and cap clock speeds, it also disables night-shift and screws with all of the background process and predictive fetching, etc which the OS does.

I guess it does, since it saves so much power compared to running without the battery-saving mode. Still, I haven't noticed anything not working as expected, in my daily use.

You would get much of the benefit without a special mode by disabling background app refresh, location services and periodic mail fetch.

> So basically, default mode should be battery-saving mode.

The default mode is already a battery-saving one, you can get an impression of a non-battery-saving mode by playing a game continuously, your battery will get run into the ground in 2~3h.

> Am I missing something?

Low Power Mode is not about downclocking the phone and trying to sip power, it's about disabling a number of features which can already be disabled individually, but which (as far as Apple is concerned anyway) most users want/use:

* animated transitions

* automatic mail fetch

* Hey Siri

* background app refresh

* automatic downloads

* wifi association/roaming

* night shift

In essence, LPM makes the smartphone less smart to try and last a bit longer. If these are smarts you don't need, you could disable them all along.

It's also setting display brightness a bit down.

This smells fishy to me.

Why did they test in High Performance power mode? The default is Balanced.

High Performance mode doesn't allow the CPU to downclock, keeping it at the maximum frequency at all times, even with zero load. It also maintains a higher screen brightness, and stops wifi and disks from entering power-saving modes too. This is NOT a negligible difference.

The _concept_ behind optimizing for energy savings in a browser is absolutely brilliant. Why pollute it by using such blatantly fake numbers?

Using HPM eliminates confounding factors. You won't get real world numbers because some of the benefit is provided by the OS/hardware, but you'll know if your changes are actually making a difference during the times that they are active.

It's simply not an appropriate test. You don't use high performance mode when you care about battery life.

I don't get your objection here. Not only does high-performance mode eliminate OS-level confounders that would otherwise render consumption deltas highly questionable, it does so in a way that produces worst-case results.

What exactly are you complaining about?

All that other stuff impacts battery life in a huge way. Those variables matter. You can't just remove them, call it a "worst case scenario", and walk away. That is not valid.

When a reputable site like Anandtech reviews a laptop, they don't force it to maximum performance mode, because nobody that cares about battery life would ever do that. It's testing a scenario that _doesn't matter_.

In fact, not only is it not the default, but maximum performance mode doesn't even _show_ by default-- you need to expand a "show additional plans" dropdown in the power control panel to see it. Opera went to the trouble to do that, and it was not by accident.

I think you're looking for a followup study that complements these results, but that study would be not as valuable as with these to inform their interpretation.

They state in the article that there are a lot of variables to account for when measuring battery savings - keeping it in high-performance mode likely makes it a more reliable control for testing against.

Again, testing battery life savings with all power-saving options disabled is simply not appropriate. It stinks.

If you want to see a hard to justify CPU hog, take a look at the amount of CPU Chrome or Firefox use for downloading a file. Then compare it to wget.

Reminds me of Intellij IDEA's power saving mode.

This is my very unscientific method, but it really seems to work. On my i7-4510 with FF I was using 7500mW. With opera I am using 5500mW. That is a pretty good savings. The only issue I am having is three finger swiping to go back and forth doesn't seem to work.

How does it fare compared to dillo ? That's right.

Opera trying hard to survive these days. I would use it if they open their source code

Opera is staging and making some last minute "value adds" before selling to a Chinese Tech company: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-10/opera-soft...

It has nothing to do with surviving. They just want to cash out.

Power consumption improves a lot with malware filters.

Decided to install opera, discovered there's no way to disable speed dial and I was out of there. Why would I want a browser I can't control?

Hmm, kinda odd. Not sure if you are comparing this to Chrome, Safari or Edge but with those you have a lot less control over the start/speed-dial page. Use the gear icon in the upper right to edit nearly everything on the speed dial page including turning speed dial off.

One of the main reasons I switched to Opera was the ability to have more control over the start page.

The biggest reason to switch to Opera now is the ad blocker is much faster than ABP/Ghost/etc and web pages load significantly faster now.

With chrome you have more control over the start page, in that you can change it from the default one to a totally different one, but when comparing opera's speed dial to chrome's default start page Opera's is definitely far superior (and more customizable). The speed dial is the main reason I use opera as well (I like it much better than any speed dial addons for chrome/firefox, and even vivaldi's speed dial)

edit: apparently there are opera addons that allow you to load a custom page instead of the speed dial so that may also be a moot point anyway

I'm on Developer branch, so maybe it's different in the "normal" version.

When you open the start page, on the upper right corner you have a config button. Among other options there was "Speed Dial" check box. Is that what you wanted?

So I have a dropdown that shows me my open tabs (presumably not what you're talking about) in the upper right corner of the window.

A cog which lets me 'Customise start page' but expanding Navigation and unchecking Speed Dial did not disable speed dial.

On the top left I have a Menu but the only thing I can see to do with speed dial is a button which opens it in a new tab or focuses a tab which already has it open.

I really just want a blank page when I open a new tab.

Opera 37 on Windows.

Yes. Go to Settings > Browser > Show advanced settings then go to Speed Dial > Cog icon > Disable everything there.

Thanks! Not sure why that's an advanced setting but there we are.

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