Chrome Is Now Less Of A Power Hog Thanks To Latest Update

Although it dominates the web browser industry as the single most popular surfing platform, Google Chrome comes with a lot of issues. One of the biggest is its propensity to drain laptop and smart device batteries fast, which can be a bit annoying when surfing on the go. With the latest version of the browser, this becomes less of a problem by reducing the power consumption of background tabs.

Chrome 57 is already available for users to download and install, with the background tabs getting a significantly reduced presence when not in use. According to the announcement post that Google wrote about the changes, this is important in order to increase the efficiency of browsing the web.

“Via the new throttling policy, Chrome 57 will delay timers to limit average CPU load to 1% of a core if an application uses too much CPU in background,” the post reads. “Tabs playing audio or maintaining real-time connections like WebSockets or WebRTC won’t be affected.”

One of the biggest annoyances to using Chrome has always been the power consumption of the background tabs, but an equally frustrating factor is how they also take up a lot of processing power. This makes browsing on a laptop without being plugged in a chore since it takes a lot longer to use applications, Gizmodo points out.

The only real solution to this problem is not having so many background tabs, in the first place, but this is simply not an option for a lot of users. As a result, Google has been trying to find a workaround in order to boost performance and reduce battery power consumption while still allowing users to maintain multiple tabs.

As for how it works, the long and short of it is that the background tabs are given 10 seconds to be used again or they will be provided with less processing power. This works best for when running music or support pages.