Google Chrome Tests New Feature To Save Battery Life

Google Chrome is now exploring a feature that will save up to two hours of battery life when multiple tabs are open at once.

According to Mashable, the company plan to limit battery consumption by limiting JavaScript timer wake ups in background tabs. This new experimental feature is being shipped with Chrome 86 and can be accessed via chrome://flags.

Talking about the way it works to optimise the battery life -- the JavaScript timers are used by pages at intervals to track various actions on a web page. For instance, such trackers are used to checking if the scrolling position has been changed, to report logs, and to analyse interactions with ads.

However, when pages are in the background, these timers do not make as much sense. Hence, with the new feature, Google is exploring how much battery can be conserved by limiting the Javascript timer interval to wake up only once every minute.

According to tests carried by Google (results obtained by TheWindowsClub), doing so extends battery by almost two hours when 36 background pages are open and active tab is blank. But since having the active tab blank does not accurately reflect a normal usage scenario, Google also tested by running YouTube on the active tab and disabling screen dimming or energy-saving mode.

With the same 36 background pages open, this test extended the battery life by about half an hour or 13 per cent. While it is not as exciting as the results of the previous test, it is an improvement.

While this might not make much of a difference in laptops with great battery life, the new feature will certainly help the laptops that do not excel in the battery department.

The feature will be supported on Google Chrome for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and Chrome OS. 

(ANI)

Raj Kantak

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