New Chrome update ‘throttles’ tabs so your laptop can last longer
Google claims this could reduce CPU use and increase battery life by an hour
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Your support makes all the difference.Google’s latest update of its Chrome browser to make it work faster and give your computer better battery life.
It will also make it easier for you to revisit a website when you have accidentally clicked a link on another page – something Google claims happens one in every five times.
Chrome 87, the latest update for the browser this year, will update how the browser manages resources with “tab throttling, occlusion tracking, and back/forward caching”, according to a blog post by Mark Chang, Google’s Chrome Product Manager
Tab throttling is one way Chrome manages how much of a computer’s resources is used by certain operations. This will mean that background tabs will not alert the CPU in as many instances, as well as no longer rendering tabs that users cannot see on screen.
“This reduces CPU usage by up to 5x, and extends battery life up to 1.25 hours in our internal testing”, Chang claims, which also should not affect background features like notifications or music.
Google Chrome will also better be able to optimise resources based on the windows tabs that users are using, with more precise information gathered by Chrome via occlusion tracking.
“With this information, Chrome can optimize resources for the tabs you are using, not the ones you’ve minimized, making Chrome up to 25 per cent faster to start up and seven per cent faster to load pages, all while using less memory”, Chang says.
Finally, the back/forward cache which Chrome uses to quickly change pages when a user hits the back or forward buttons in the browser, have been made faster.
“In Chrome 87, our back/forward cache will make 20 per cent of those back/forward navigations instant, with plans to increase this to 50 per cent through further improvements and developer outreach in the near future” Chang wrote.
In May, Google also updated Chrome – giving users more control over tabs with a feature called Tab Groups.
Users can now group tabs together and label them with a custom name or colour, before moving them around or reordering them.
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