Chrome has been dragging the label of being a resource eater for years, read memory, but also autonomy, and Google has been working for years to solve it or, rather, to mitigate the voracity of the browser, given that power requires resources. That is why, for years, the patches have followed one another.
As a curiosity, six years ago Google defended itself against Microsoft’s accusations – ensuring that Chrome (53) no longer devoured batteries, although the truth is that this type of complaint occurred before and after, especially in relation to the impact that the browser has on the autonomy of portable equipment.
In this regard, Google has not stopped implementing measures to improve the performance and consumption of Chrome, for example by fine-tuning certain settings in one way or another, usually through exhaustive control processes of the use of resources (CPU and RAM) of Chrome itself.
As features are understandable to the user, the freezing of the tabs that are not being used to free up memory, part of the “battery saving” mode, will sound familiar to you. But there is also the “high efficiency” mode. The unique thing about both modes is that they are new to the user: it is the browser that manages itself… and it is not always right. Thus, Google intends to solve it with user intervention.
To do this, the developers of Chrome are working on two indicators that the user can activate and deactivate on demand, forgive the redundancy, and activate and deactivate the battery-saving and high-efficiency modes. As simple as clicking and… done!
As far as is known, the battery-saving mode (the lightning bolt icon) will operate with certain processes in the background, in addition to reducing the visual effects of Chrome and, therefore, the energy consumption. On the other hand, the high-efficiency mode will do the same with the tabs in the background, being able to specify the time or add exceptions for websites.
At the moment, of course, neither one nor the other is within the reach of common Chrome users, since these are features that are still under development and will take more or less to be implemented, only in Chrome, or will they also be implemented in other Chromium derivatives? We will have to see it, but in principle, there should be no problem for it to be a shared function.
