Do you use Google's Chrome web browser on your Windows laptop? Does it seem like your laptop battery drains faster as a result of intensive Chrome usage?
It's not just your imagination. Google has just acknowledged a flaw in Chrome that will indeed accelerate battery usage on Windows laptops. A flaw that users have been reporting to Google since 2010.
The flaw? It's all about the "tick rate," which is a proper name for a bug.
It seems that when most browsers, including Chrome, are in active use, they run at a clock tick rate of about 1 millisecond. But when browsers are open in the background but not active, all of them except Chrome for Windows ease up to roughly 15 milliseconds, which drops power consumption by about 25 percent. Chrome for Windows keeps on tickin' at 1 millisecond, conserving no energy.
Clock tick is a measurement of how often Windows wakes the processor. The processor sleeps while inactive, waking at predetermined intervals. By keeping this interval at 1 millisecond, Chrome refuses to let the processor sleep. At 1 millisecond, the processor wakes 1,000 times per second. At the resting interval of 15.625 milliseconds, the processor wakes a mere 64 times per second to stay in the loop. Or maybe loop is not the best choice of words.
Why it has taken Google four years to investigate users' complaints about excess power consumption is best known only by Google, but the company has finally admitted culpability and has prioritized working on an update to fix the issue.
As a stopgap, users should open another browser, or close Chrome when not in use.
Microsoft Explorer and Mozilla Firefox do not suffer from these issues. Nor is the problem applicable to Macs, which do not use the same internal clocking system as Windows. Therefore, Chrome for Mac is not affected by this problem, but there are other problems with Chrome that do increase power consumption on battery-powered Mac laptops. For Mac owners running OSX Mavericks (the newest release), browser tabs that are not in use can be set to sleep, which assuages the problem.
Of course, this problem is really only an issue if a laptop is working off battery power. If Google Chrome is a preferred browser and the laptop is plugged into an electrical outlet, then there's no penalty except for an insignificant uptick in an electric bill.
