The last couple of months have been groundbreaking for the Opera browser and the company that owns it, as it made headlines with the announcement of a native ad-blocking feature as well as a VPN integrated into the browser.

So far, this year has been favorable to Opera, based on a comparison of its achievements with that of rivals Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and even Apple's Safari.

The company behind Opera announced in a blog post the debut of a power-saving mode for desktop and mobile computers. This is good news for laptop users, as browsing would not be as taxing to their batteries anymore. The fact that Opera is still able to dish out feature after feature is a clear statement that it is a serious player in the browser wars.

Opera's version of the new power-saving feature, which is available on the Opera developer channel, is meant to compete directly with Google Chrome, and is tested to extend a laptop's battery life by up to 50 percent over the rival brand. What this means for users is several hours of extra browsing before the need to recharge or plug into a power source.

Opera designed this new feature to be easily accessible and user-friendly. All that needs to be done to utilize the feature is clicking on the battery icon if and when their power cable is unplugged. Users will even get a reminder from the browser to turn it on when the machine's power is already decreased to 20 percent.

When this feature is activated, Opera makes a few process adjustments while browsing, such as reducing background activity in other tabs, pausing unused plugins, pausing animations from themes, reducing the frame rate to 30 frames per second, and adjusting video playback parameters. Despite all the adjustments, browsing speed does not suffer.

Empirical data based on actual tests to determine that browser speed was not affected by this new feature has been produced. A test showed that on a laptop running a 64 bit Windows 10 operating system, the Opera developer version outlasted battery life by 50 percent than the one that used Chrome.

Although there has been abundant positive press for Opera these last couple of months, it is still way behind from Chrome and Firefox in terms of users.