Google Chrome will be introducing a new feature that will save up to two hours of battery life when multiple tabs are open at once.
According to Mashable, the company plans to limit battery consumption by limiting JavaScript timer wake ups in background tabs. This new experimental feature is to be rolled out with Chrome 86 and can be accessed through chrome://flags.
The JavaScript timers are used by the pages at intervals to track various actions on a web page. The timer interval is studied to save battery life. However, when pages are in the background these timers do not matter.
According to tests carried by Google (results-oriented by TheWindowsClub), doing so extends battery by almost two hours when 36 background pages are open and active tab is blank. But as having active tab blank does not accurately reflect a normal usage scenario, Google also tested by running YouTube on the active tab and disabling screen dimming (energy-saving mode).
With the same situation of 36 pages open in the background, the battery life was extended by about half an hour or 13%. While this might not make much difference in laptops with good battery life, it will surely help in the laptops which are poor in battery life.
Source: ANI