Google hopes to greatly reduce the energy consumption of its Chrome browser by limiting the background process of tabs. The company is considering reducing the javascript wake-up timer of the tab currently in the background to 1 minute. This will increase the battery life of the laptop by 28% (2 hours) in some of its test cases. This action will restrict javascript in background tags from doing unnecessary tasks. Some of these tasks include checking whether the scroll position has changed, reporting logs, and analyzing interactions with ads.
Gizchina News of the week
In a test case, Google loaded 36 random background tabs, and the battery life of the blank foreground label increased by 28%. With the 36 random background tabs and foreground labels (including YouTube videos), the battery life is 13% (36 minutes) better without throttling.
Apple Safari makes use of a 1-minute polling interval. Nevertheless lowering the polling limit will cause problems with web applications. Thus, Google is considering activating the new limit only after 5 minutes of inactivity. Also, it will consider allowing enterprise users to use the group policy for one year.
When the Javascript timer is delayed by more than 5 seconds, Google will also post a message in the DevTools console. The move is currently being tested in the Chrome 86 browser. However, there is no certainty that this will actually roll out to the general public.
