It’s no secret that Chrome can be a very power-hungry browser on a laptop.
Google is constantly evolving Chrome to be less power hungry while also offering increased performance, and the latest development arriving in Chrome 57 focuses on power savings from further background tab management. With the latest version, tabs open but not currently in use will be more aggressively throttled to save power.
Chrome will accomplish this by more aggressively limiting the rate at which timers in the pages can fire when it notices that those particular tabs are consuming more power than they should. Chrome 57 will delay timers to keep average CPU load under 1% of a core in order to save power. Of course if a tab is playing audio or has a real-time connection like a video call it won’t be limited.
In Google’s testing, Chrome 57’s new policies on background tabs has initially led to 25% fewer busy background tabs. Ideally, the Chrome team hopes that webpage developers will adjust their behavior to rely on new APIs for service workers to do background tasks rather than simply forcing a tab to stay active.
The end result, both in the short- and long-term, is longer battery life when using Chrome on your laptop. And all you have to do is keep your Chrome browser up to date.
