Google to throttle Chrome tabs to boost battery life

According to Google, background tabs are responsible for up to a third of Chrome’s power use on a desktop. Tabs that are playing music in the background won’t be throttled, and neither will tabs that use WebSockets or WebRTC-think video chat apps and persistent messaging apps like Slack.

After 10 seconds of being in the background, each individual tab will be limited to a budget of CPU usage, measured in the seconds of real-world time taken to complete a particular process. The latest improvement focuses on background tabs, which are now said to use less power. This means Chrome 57 will now suspend those websites, such as news and social media ones, which refresh periodically. According to Timin, the browser will further delay those timers to limit the average processor load to just 1% of a single-core CPU.

Google is taking steps to vanquish is power hog demons with the release of Chrome 57.

Ultimately, the Chrome team hopes to make it so that background tabs are suspended completely.

Chrome has always been criticized for using too much power and draining notebook battery life, but Google has been taking some steps lately to improve the browser’s efficiency. However, version 57 brings it perfectly with a time budget for every background tab.

The Google engineer noted that Chrome 57’s new background tab throttling mechanism typically results in 25% fewer busy tabs running in the background.

Google has added a Read Later feature to Chrome on iOS. If you haven’t already been automatically updated, it’ll download.

It may be iOS-only right now, but a cloud-synced, free read-it-later service built into Chrome would be helpful for users across all platforms. Desktop users get the satisfaction of knowing their precious CPU cycles aren’t being wasted, but the changes could lead to tangible increases in battery life for Chrome users on laptops and other mobile devices.