To extend the battery life on mobile devices, Chrome is testing a new feature called the ‘Quick Intensive Throttling’, that’ll consume less power when the browser is in use.
Chrome intends to throttle the performance of hidden tabs – that were loaded but are set in the background – after 10 seconds to reduce the wakeup time, resulting in consuming less power. This is expected to increase the battery life by at least an hour.
Chrome’s Quick Intensive Throttling
Though Googles Chrome is one of the best and most widely used browsers today, it’s often criticized for sucking more of a CPU to do the regular operations. This ultimately reduces the battery life – which is an important factor in mobile devices like smartphones and laptops.
Thus, Chrome in v87 introduced a feature called the Intensive Wake Up Throttling – that prevents the browser’s JavaScript from waking up a tab more than once a minute, after it was suspended and hidden from view for more than 5 minutes.
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This resulted in Chrome using 5x less CPU power and extending the battery life by 1.25 hours! Since it’s successful, Chrome is improving this period to attain even better results. As noted by About Chromebooks, Chrome is testing a new feature called “Quick Intensive Throttling“ in the latest Dev and Canary versions.
As per it, the grace period of 5 minutes is now reduced to just 10 seconds to attain more battery life by reducing the CPU power consumption even more. Chrome noted that the “5 minutes timeout is very conservative“, thus choosing to “allow a launch of Intensive Wake Up Throttling with minimal regression risk.”
Although, it applies only to pages considered loaded and hidden from sight. Interested people can try this now, if running on Chrome Canary or Dev builds, with the following instructions;
- Open Chrome Canary or Developer and enter chrome://flags/#quick-intensive-throttling-after-loading in the address bar, as shown below.
- Set the ‘Quick intensive throttling after loading‘ flag to Enabled and relaunch Chrome when prompted.
