Chrome 57 Adds Better Battery Life To Computers; Saves At Least 25% Of Battery Use

Google Chrome 57 has been introduced last week for Windows, Mac, and Linux users and the best part is that it adds a lot of battery saving. It was found that laptop users were quite unhappy with the battery draining issues of the previous Chrome versions. The latest news confirms that the new version has remedied it by executing better throttling management of background tabs.

It is reported that the background tabs of Chrome use a third of its total power usage and the latest version of Chrome ensures less timer fire rate for the tabs and reduces the usage of excess power. Chrome 57 restricts the timers for background tabs to run once per second. Thus, it helps the browser to limit itself the excess usage in the CPU and restricts it less than 1 percent of the total CPU usage. Interestingly, tabs running audio or real-time connections in the background, like WebRTC or WebSockets, won't get affected.

The new mechanism helps Chrome 57 to be 25 percent less busy on background tabs, and that gets translated into a significant energy saved. Alexander Timin, the developer of with Google Chrome, confirmed that the ultimate goal of Chrome is to fully suspend the background tabs and instead introduce new APIs for service people to work on the background. He said that Chrome is working towards the goal to further enhance the battery life by ensuring all the enhancements and experiences of Chrome is maintained.

Interestingly, the latest version of Google 57 named 57.0.2987.100 for iOS comes with "read later" feature. People can add pages to read later by tapping the Share icon and adding to the reading list. Even if there is no internet at a later time, the option helps the people to read the saved pages. This is working on the lines of "read later" feature added in Safari.