Chrome is the most popular desktop browser, at least here in the US. But while it’s popular and powerful and fast (mostly) and has apps and extensions and syncs between devices and all that, it’s not exactly efficient or good when it comes to your battery life. I’m talking about on laptops, of course, because desktops don’t have batteries. Reports (and complaints) about how good Chrome is at sucking your battery dry before you want it to have not gone unnoticed by Google, thankfully.
Today, the company announced Chrome 45, which focuses on making your favorite browser “use less memory and power.”
Features like Chrome’s “continue where you left off” are now smarter and more efficient, by prioritizing which tabs restore from most to least recently viewed. Chrome 45 will also detect if your computer is starting to run out of resources and will then stop restoring tabs to hopefully help save memory. In another memory usage reducing move, Chrome can now detect which pages aren’t busy with tasks and will use the “free time to aggressively clean up old, unused memory.” Google says this change alone has reduced website memory usage by 10%.
As for power consumption, a new setting that auto-pauses Flash content that’s not “central to a website,” can make your battery last up to 15% longer depending on the operating system. Over the next few weeks, Google plans to turn this feature on by default.
This may not be Android-related right now, but Google is always looking to improve efficiency with Chrome on all of its platforms.
Via: Chrome Blog