If a few years ago I had been asked what is the natural predator of laptop battery, without a doubt would have pointed to games, as well as to certain creative processes (mainly video editing and postproduction). To this day I am not so clear, since a new predator cries, every day more, to occupy the first position on that disastrous podium. I’m talking, and if you have a laptop you surely know it from your own experience, from Google Chrome.
Now, in this aspect we must be fair and recognize that yes, the Google browser has quite improvable aspects, such as its memory management, but that an important part of the responsibility in battery consumption is given not by the browser itself, but for the content of the websites that we have open in it. And it is that many sites, when loaded, start a multitude of processes that remain active until we leave that page.
And this can be a small problem if we talk about one or two tabs, but every time I meet fewer people who only have one or two tabs open in the browser. Right now, I just counted them and I have eleven (and they are few for what is my normality), so just think for a moment to imagine the number of processes loaded in memory and consuming resources (and battery) that I must have active right now on my PC. And the problem is that those many of those processes remain active, even if the web is in the background.
However, and so and as reported MSPoweruser, the Google Chrome development team is working on a solution that could very significantly reduce energy consumption, and therefore battery in the case of browser laptops. And what does this solution consist of? Well, surely you can imagine it after what I said earlier: in reduce the workload generated by elements in javascript of all the pages that are in the background, that is, to reduce and avoid unnecessary processes when the user is not viewing that page.
Sure, here it is important to note that uThe tab can be in the background and still have active processes on user demand. A very clear case would be, for example, having a tab with a music streaming service open but in the background. In such a case it would not make sense for the browser to limit or stop these processes, no matter how much battery it saves. Thus, Google engineers are working on related processes in direct user interactions with page elements.
In the tests carried out, in some of which Improvements in battery life of up to 28% were obtained, 36 background tabs were loaded, while multiple actions were performed in the active tab, from showing a blank page to playing a YouTube video. In the “worst” case, it was possible to increase the battery life by 13%.
This function is still undergoing tests, since it is not known what incidence it may have in some uses of the tabs in the background. So, Google is considering a generic adjustment and allow users who use the professional services of the company to make changes in them, to adapt it to their specific needs. There is still no forecast on which version of the browser this feature will be incorporated into.
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