Perhaps the fairest approach would be to compare results across the different browsers with the presence or absence of various adblockers:

* Edge (no adblocker) * Opera (default adblocker) * Opera (adblocker disabled) * Chrome (no adblocker) * Chrome (uBlock Origin)

Otherwise you're just lying through omission to make your product seem better.

I wish they had done this instead of just said "look ours is faster when we enable adblocker on one browser but don't use it on another."

And they say "Opera Developer (39.0.2248.0)" - which is presumably a dev build of the browser.

Like it would be fine if they say "in next version we will retake the top" or whatever but don't try to dispute their results by providing something they had no way of measuring.

The developer stream is public, and so is the exact build they used[1].

[1] http://get.opera.com/pub/opera-developer/39.0.2248.0/

I wouldn't switch to an unstable browser just to improve battery life. It just shows that they're not really trying to get a fair test. I'm running ad blocker in Chrome and it works perfectly. I'd be interested if they could improve on that significantly, but I trust Google more in creating a stable software.

I think you are unaware how marketing works (the whole power saving competition from both Microsoft and Opera is just marketing).

Essentially they did some power saving improvements and want to create a bit of noise about it to increase their popularity.

It's kind of same as how Apple, Google etc announce new features/products before you even can use them.

Even with the ad blocker being a feature in opera out of the box? They were trying to show that opera can achieve better battery performance based on it's features and optimizations. Does that not include the ad-blocker?

In that case you might as well browse different websites because using adblocker makes your browser render different content.

Microsoft is welcome to include a native content blocker in their rendering engine

While I applaud their work and appreciate that there is an extension framework at all, I seriously doubt this will happen unless they plan to also redesign their home pages to remove the ads.

I just loaded up MSN.com and scrolled down the page. I count 3 ads total: one gigantic banner at the very top of the page before all of the content, and two smaller panners that pop into place as you scroll. These are served by AdChoices. When I turn my ad blocker back on, these all disappear, and the site loads much faster.

I think if Microsoft were to release a default ad-blocker, they would need to re-code their own website to use native advertising rather than a third-party network. I believe this to be an excellent practice, but I just don't see Microsoft going this route. I'd love to be pleasantly surprised though.

I assume they would implement a white-list allowing "some non-intrusive adds" similar to Adblock.

Sure, but then my browser with native procrastination protection will beat the pants off both: when you type in a url it just renders "get back to work, maggot."

It even works without a network connection.

Not necessarily true if both ad blockers are using the same filter lists. I find Adblock Plus and uBlock Origin (I prefer the latter) to be relatively on par in terms of things they block and things they tend to miss, even cross browser. I think the initial pageload would be the biggest differnce, as it relies on the performance of the adblocker in applying its filters to the DOM once it's loaded. The underlying extension framework probably affects this a lot too.

I'd think the user agent string is more likely to cause a huge discrepancy, as many frameworks will be utilizing polyfills and employing different technologies depending on what each browser supports. (Or, in the case of the user agent string, what the framework thinks the browser supports, regardless of how correct its assumptions are.)

His point is that only one of the browsers was using an ad blocker so they were rendering different content because one rendered ads and the other did not.

Oh, I totally missed the part where Opera has the ad blocker turned on by default. Ignore my rambling then; my sleepy brain thought he was talking about two browsers that both had different ad blockers installed.

Not sure if Opera has it on by default - all they say is that it is build-in so that somehow makes it okay to use it and compare apples to oranges :)

If I understand both tests correctly, Opera ran with adblock and battery saver enabled (those are apparently not default settings), versus Edge without adblock, on sites which supposedly are ad-heavy - this will bias the results towards browser with adblock enabled.

Exactly, it's like saying your bus with no passengers gets better gas mileage than your competitors bus with 60 passengers.

yeah it's like comparing MPG of similar cars but Opera test is done in the middle of the night and competitors at rush hour

Your analogy collapses then though because you need people to be able to choose whether to travel at day/night at will for the comparison. Perhaps a better (but still flawed) way would be to say if the Opera browser included a free pass for toll roads and Edge didn't - so with the standard Opera offering you'd be getting a faster journey.

The point to me is that the situation is more nuanced than Microsoft apparently chose to present it.

Well, when you are the person performing the test you can somewhat control the conditions. ;) Opera just chose to drive in the night but sent Edge through rush hour.

It's not on by default though.

Their power saver isn't on by default either

Limiting the test to features built into the browser is pointless and doesn't represent real usage. People who turn on the Opera ad-blocker will install an ad-blocker in Chrome, Edge, or Firefox.

They could have turned on an ad blocker for Edge as well.

It doesn't.

But there's no reason anyone should be running a browser without an ad-blocker in the first place. Edge should have a lightweight ad-blocker built-in by default.

Considering Microsoft recently added ads to the Windows 10 login screen, I wouldn't hold my breath on Edge coming with an ad blocker out of the box.

EDIT: Downvotes? Really this is factually accurate:

http://lifehacker.com/windows-10-is-showing-ads-on-your-lock...

The article you linked to specifically talks about how easy it is to turn them off.

I knew someone would make this lame excuse. That's like saying "Hey if you don't want me to take a shit on your sandwich it's really easy to order it without the shit."

OP never claimed it wasn't easy to turn them off.

The thing is, ad blocker is disabled by default in Opera.

How would that fair with Bing's ad network?

How is that the user's problem?

It's not, but it's Microsoft's problem. The reason Edge exists is to try to win back market share from Chrome. The reason Chrome exists is to perpetuate the Google ecosystem by making Google offerings cross-platform, but more importantly Chrome-platform -- not just Google ads.

But you're right, Microsoft will have to decide which one is more important: driving ad eyeballs to Microsoft properties at the expense of Google properties -- or -- decreasing the share of users using Chrome and by proxy, the attractiveness of Google's integrated cloud email/drive/docs offerings.

Microsoft adding an ad-blocker by default, while also owning an ad service seems to be a set of conflicting interests.

At least Opera was transparent about the details of their test. Was Microsoft?