A new feature coming to Chrome could boost your laptop's battery life, potentially solving one of the biggest problems with using Google's web browser on a mobile device.
According to the About Chromebooks website (opens in a new tab), there is a new flag (which is an experimental feature) in Chrome OS 105 that prevents JavaScript from running in the background on websites you have open in tabs but not without looking. .
This extends a feature added in Chrome OS 88, which set a five-minute timer that prevented scripts from running immediately. The idea was that these scripts consume CPU power, and the more your laptop's CPU is used, the faster your battery will drain.
If you have a lot of tabs open that are running JavaScript, this can have a huge impact on your laptop's battery life.
As found in About Chromebooks, in Chrome OS 105 there is a new experimental flag:
chrome://flags#intensive-fast-aceleration-after-load
This, according to Google's documentation (opens in a new tab), will reduce the "grace period" from five minutes to just 10 seconds, as long as the web page is both open and hidden (for example, if you open a web page in a new tab, but don't instantly switch to the tab).
Analysis: what it means to you
(Image credit: fizkes/Shutterstock)
It appears that since its addition in Chrome OS 88, the "Intensive fast acceleration of background pages loaded timer" feature has been successful, prompting Google to consider reducing the "conservative" grace period from five minutes to a few minutes. seconds.
In a post on Chrome's Platform Status page (Opens in a new tab), it is reported that “this should improve battery life. An experience on the Canary and Dev channels revealed no regression from our guide metrics and there is [sic] Significant (~10%) improvement in CPU time when all tabs are hidden and silent.
Flagshipping Chrome OS, this feature is expected to primarily benefit Chromebooks, which run the operating system. It's based on the Chrome browser and uses multiple tabs, so expect the Chromebook's already impressive battery life to be even longer.
However, does that mean Chromebook owners are out of luck? Not necessarily, as we imagine this feature will be integrated into the Chrome web browser as well, so if you use it on your regular laptop, you'll also see your device last longer when running on battery power, and all for free.
This is still an experimental feature at this time, so it's not enabled by default, although you can enable it by going to chrome://flags and finding it there. Hopefully, after a trial period to make sure it doesn't cause any problems, it will be added to Chrome OS and Chrome in the near future.
