Google hopes to reduce energy consumption by throttling background processes for tabs on Google Chrome. According to a recent report from Engadget, they're looking to improving the battery life of users' devices by up to two hours.
The company is said to be working on reducing the wake-up timer of the javascript on devices for up to a minute for tabs currently running in the background. It has been regarded that this move tested in a few devices will improve battery life by up to 28%.
Can Google Chrome improve your device's battery life?
This update will be limiting javascript from doing smaller and unnecessary tasks such as checking if there are changes in the scroll position, the analysis of ad interactions, and log reporting.
Google conducted a test case where they loaded 36 background tabs in the background chosen at random, with a blank space foreground tab, and discovered the battery life went up by 28%.
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With this, the company also had these background tabs play a video from YouTube, and with the feature, the battery life still increased by up to 13% or approximately 36 minutes, compared to not using the throttling system.
To provide an overview, Safari is known to use the one-minute intervals in the polling. However, reducing the limit on the polling brings out issues in the web app. The website is considering having to activate new limits after five minutes of inactive tabs. They're also looking at allowing enterprise users of their platform to opt-out of the change utilizing a group policy for 12 months.
Javascript timer
Google is also seeking to post an update in their DevTools console each time the Javascript timer delays by more than about five seconds.
The test is being done on Chrome 86 at the back of a flag. However, this new update won't be launched yet for mainstream customers.
According to Google, when a timer on Javascript brings up a wake-up, every Javascript-ready timer can work even if they haven't caused this wake-up. Company engineers may continue to implement the feature to significantly reduce battery consumption.
Here's what happens
Once a webpage in the background runs for five minutes, Chrome is set to alight the javascript timer wake up which is less than or equivalent to five minutes with a minute of intervals. Likewise, the platform will also align the timer wake ups with a timeout more than five minutes to second intervals.
There is a policy in the enterprise that will let administrators disable the feature in Chrome. With this, the browser may not cause negative effects when the feature is brought to being stable. However, Google reveals that the policy will be retired 12 months after the feature ships to stability.
