New version of Chrome is much easier on your laptop's battery
If there's one complaint about Chrome that keeps popping up lately, it's that Google's web browser -- once a lightweight alternative to the much slower Internet Explorer and Firefox -- is a resources hog.
Now, Google has partly addressed that issue by throttling background tabs so that they don't use a lot of CPU time, thus saving power.
According to a post on Google's Chromium blog, the change, which went live with Chrome version 57, makes background tabs 25% less busy. This, in turn, should have a considerable impact on a laptop's battery life, though Google doesn't state exactly how big.
The change will not affect tabs playing audio or maintaining real-time connections such as WebSockets and WebRTC.
A technical explanation, aimed at developers, of how the new Chrome handles background tabs is available here.
Google says the long-term goal is for background tabs to be fully suspended, with services that need to do stuff in the background relying on new APIs, but we're not quite there yet. In the meantime, Google will do what it can to make Chrome suck on that battery a little slower.
Chrome 57 is available for download now. If you already have it, it likely auto-updated to the last available version already.
Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
