A new feature in Chrome could increase laptop battery power — potentially solving one of the biggest problems with using Google‘s web browser on mobile.
According to the About Chromebook website, there’s a new flag in Chrome OS 105 that prevents JavaScript from running in the background on websites you’ve opened in a tab but aren’t viewing.
This expands on a feature added in Chrome OS 88 that sets a five-minute timer to prevent scripts from running immediately. The thinking at the time was that these scripts would be CPU-intensive, and the more the laptop’s processor was used, the faster the battery drained.
If you have a lot of tabs open that are running JavaScript, this can have a big impact on your laptop’s battery life.
Analysis: what this means for you
It appears to have been successful since the “fast intensive timer limit for loading background pages” feature was added in Chrome OS 88, leading Google to consider reducing the “conservative” grace period of five minutes to a few seconds.
In a post on the Chrome Platform Status page, it was reported, “This is expected to improve battery life. An experiment on the Canary and Dev channels did not show any regression to our guidance metrics, and when all tabs are hidden There was a [sic] significant improvement in CPU time (~10%) when silent and silent.”
As a hallmark of Chrome OS, this feature is expected to primarily benefit Chromebooks running the operating system. It’s based on the Chrome browser and uses multiple tabs, so we’d expect Chromebooks to have better battery life.
But does that mean non-Chromebook users are out of luck? Not necessarily, as we imagine this feature is also coming to the Chrome web browser, so if you’re using it on a regular laptop, you can also expect to see your device last longer on battery – and it’s all free.
This is still an experimental feature at the moment, so it’s not enabled by default, but you can turn it on by going to chrome://flags and finding it there. Hopefully after a while of testing to make sure it doesn’t cause any issues, it will be added to Chrome OS and Chrome in the near future.
>>>>>>>>>>Google battery