Credit: Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
- Google is testing a new power saving functionality in Chrome.
- In some cases, the feature can increase battery life by up to two hours.
- Currently, you can only access the feature through a brand in Chrome 86, but it works on both desktop and mobile devices.
You have to go back almost to the beginning of the history of Chrome as a web browser to find a time when it would not be considered a battery and memory accumulator. But it seems Google is working on something that can address at least one of those problems. According to The Windows ClubThe company is testing an experimental feature on Chrome 86 that reduces battery consumption.
The new tool works by limiting the background tabs to one Javascript timer activation call per minute. Websites often include Javascript tasks that will do things like check where the cursor is on the page and how it is interacting with the ads. There is little reason for such tasks to constantly run in the background when you’re not even looking at a web page. For good reason, this is how Safari has done things for a while.
When testing the feature, Google reported that the battery life was extended two hours when it had 36 tabs running in the background. The important thing to note here is that the foreground tab was open on a blank page. The battery savings Google saw was more modest when the company ran the same test but with a YouTube video in full-screen mode. After turning off any display settings that might affect testing, the company saw a 36-minute improvement in battery life, according to TWC.
At the moment, this power saving feature is only available as a brand in Chrome 86, which means it’s not something you can activate in the standard version of Google’s web browser. As with most of the features in development, there is also a chance that the company will scrap it entirely. The good news is that it’s available on both the desktop and mobile versions of the browser, so if you finally hit the consumer version of Chrome, you’ll be able to take advantage of its power saving capabilities on most of your devices.
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