Chrome has implemented an experimental functionality, which substantially improves energy consumption and extend battery life of a laptop.
A new experimental Chrome functionality will reduce energy consumption, resulting in longer battery life; in extreme cases, we are talking about more hours of use.
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Let’s be honest, Chrome is not exactly famous for being frugal with system resources, rather the opposite; It is a browser that stars in many ‘memes’ about the huge amount of RAM it uses, for example.
Also, if you are using a laptop, you should seriously consider trying another browser. Although things have improved a lot in recent years, tests show that Chrome continues to consume a lot. That is why alternatives have appeared that promise to lengthen the laptop battery.
Chrome will extend laptop battery life
Chrome now has the opportunity to leave this image behind, thanks to a new experimental feature that has just arrived in the developing versions of the browser.
The new option will make Chrome consume less energy, closing Javascript processes, used in the vast majority of modern web pages. Specifically, Google has realized that, while we have those web pages in a tab, the code of useless functions continues to run.
An example are timers or ‘trackers’, which are responsible for checking such as the position of the scroll, or the time that has passed since we opened the page. Both are very useful for the page experience, but if we have it in the background, they really don’t do much good.
With YouTube videos, the improvement is 36 minutes
Therefore, the Google team’s solution is to close these processes so that they stop consuming resources, focusing only on what we really need and are using.
As usual, the impact this function will have depends a lot on what we are doing; If we are one of those with dozens of tabs open, we will notice it more than if we only have two or three.
According to TheWindowsClub tests, with some 36 tabs in the background, they managed to make their laptop last no less than two more hours; This can make the difference between completing the work day and not, in some models.
Also, each page behaves differently; for example, according to the same tests, if we play YouTube videos the improvement is only 36 minutes; although it is still quite good.
In this way, Chrome could catch up with Safari, the browser that best uses macOS resources.
At the moment, this functionality could come with Chrome 86 (the current one is Chrome 83), although it all depends on whether Google is happy with the tests.
