Opera Software has taken umbrage with Microsoft over a recent claim by the Redmond company that its Edge browser is way more efficient in terms of laptop battery life than others browsers when surfing the web or streaming video.

In what Microsoft called a Microsoft Edge Experiment its own browser came out smelling of roses when pitted against Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera. Opera Software, whose browsers are used by around 350 million customers worldwide, has fired back at Microsoft.

The Norwegian company said in a blog post that when earlier this year it was busy revealing how its new battery saving feature could give up to 50 percent more battery life than Google Chrome when surfing the web, it didn’t even bother to compare its own browser with Edge only because Edge is only available in Windows 10.

In the blog post Opera Software’s Błażej Kaźmierczak discussed what he called Microsoft’s “huge PR effort”, saying, “Like most other engineering teams, we love it when someone picks a fight. If we get beaten in a test like this, we consider it a bug.”

The company says that because Microsoft didn’t reveal its “full methodology” it was unable to conduct the same test. However, Opera did conduct its own test using the same automated ‘real-life’ web-browsing simulation as it had done before when going against Google Chrome.

Unlike Microsoft, Opera was more open about how the test was performed:

“Tests will never perfectly reflect the way real people browse, but there are ways to make some tests more reliable than others. For example, you can use a variety of different websites (video, news etc,) to imitate the way users browse. You can also use a special algorithm that scrolls these websites similar way real users do. This is what we did in previous tests, and this is what we did when comparing Opera to Edge.”

The result, not surprisingly – otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this – showed that a laptop set to browse using Opera Developer with native ad blocker and power saver enabled was able to run 22% longer than a laptop using Microsoft Edge in Windows 10, and 35% longer than Google Chrome.

Opera also said that, “If Microsoft really wants to prove that its browser performs better than others (in any regard), the company should be transparent about its methodology so that others can replicate it.”

You can go to the Opera website for a more detailed explanation about how the test was done. As the browsers go to war perhaps one thing both companies might agree on is that it isn’t that their browser is more energy efficient, but was more energy efficient on that particular test.

Photo credit: andreas via Flickr