Skip to main content

Your laptop’s battery life may get a boost as Google Chrome looks to tone down background pages

Google Chrome is the world’s most popular internet browser, but it’s also notorious for eating up battery life in many cases. However, a new behind-the-scenes change may help that going forward.

In the latest updates to Google Chrome, a new flag has surfaced that shows a potential source of battery savings from the browser. Titled “quick intensive throttling,” this upcoming feature stops background pages from eating up excessive battery life.

The tweak was first spotted by the folks over at About Chromebooks in the Chrome OS 105 update, but it actually applies to all platforms that offer Google Chrome – Windows, macOS, and Linux included.

How does this work?

“Quick intensive throttling” in Chrome stops background pages from loading JavaScript elements after 10 seconds, down from the previous limit of five minutes. Google explains:

For pages that are loaded when backgrounded, activates intensive throttling after 10 seconds instead of the default 5 minutes. Intensive throttling will limit wake ups, from setTimeout and setInterval tasks with a high nesting level and delayed scheduler.postTask tasks, up to 1 per minute.

In a further comment, Google translates that to something a bit more relatable.

This is expected to extend battery life. An experiment on the Canary and Dev channels did not reveal any regression to our guiding metrics and there are significant improvement[s] (~10%) to CPU time when all tabs are hidden and silent.

Of course, this only applies under the right circumstances. For most folks, the battery life savings will come when opening several tabs at once. If a page is opened up in a new tab, but not immediately interacted with, this change would prevent that tab from fully loading and, in turn, eating up your battery. But this really only applies if the page you’re visiting relies heavily on JavaScript.

This change is only showing up for the time being in the Dev channel, so it might be a while before it expands to everyone in the Stable channel.

More on Google Chrome:

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

You’re reading 9to5Google — experts who break news about Google and its surrounding ecosystem, day after day. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news, and follow 9to5Google on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay in the loop. Don’t know where to start? Check out our exclusive stories, reviews, how-tos, and subscribe to our YouTube channel

Comments

Author

Avatar for Ben Schoon Ben Schoon

Ben is a Senior Editor for 9to5Google.

Find him on Twitter @NexusBen. Send tips to schoon@9to5g.com or encrypted to benschoon@protonmail.com.


Manage push notifications

notification icon
We would like to show you notifications for the latest news and updates.
notification icon
You are subscribed to notifications
notification icon
We would like to show you notifications for the latest news and updates.
notification icon
You are subscribed to notifications