Chrome New Function Reduces Battery Consumption By 28 Percent

To make its own browser more efficient, Google wants to significantly reduce Chrome’s energy consumption. For this, the search engine group is working on a new function that reduces the number of background processes and thus the required performance.

Battery life is increased by slowing down the JavaScript timer for background processes. As TheWindowsClub reports, the scripts are only woken up once a minute. This measure extended the battery life of the laptop on which the Chrome browser was started by two hours or 28 percent.

Scripts are updated more slowly

The test was run with 36 random browser tabs in the background and one tab in the foreground. On the first attempt, only a blank page was visible in the foreground. Here, the battery life could be increased by the aforementioned 28 percent, because the background scripts were updated at significantly longer intervals and therefore more slowly. In the second attempt, a YouTube video was played in the foreground. Here the consumption could be reduced by 13 percent and the battery life increased by 36 minutes.

The new feature is expected to update to Chrome 86 which has to be delivered. The function can currently only be tried out by activating an experimental flag option. Administrators should later be able to use a policy to deactivate the new function. This means that web-based background applications, which must always run in real-time, can continue to run without any problems.