Google testing new Chrome feature that will increase battery life on PC and mobile

Google is testing a new Chrome feature promising to reduce CPU time when all tabs are hidden and silent, increasing battery life for laptops and mobile devices.

The feature — Quick Intensive Timer Throttling — improves on an earlier change Google implemented in Chrome that prevented JavaScript from waking a tab more than once a minute after it has been hidden from view for five minutes.

The new change reduces the interval from five minutes to 10 seconds, meaning more tabs can reduce CPU usage and extend battery life.

“The JS timer Intensive Wake Up Throttling feature has been shipped in 86, which will align the timer wake-ups to 1 minute interval after a grace period of 5 minutes,” Google explained in a document detailing the new feature.

“The 5 minutes timeout is very conservative and was chosen to allow a launch of Intensive Wake Up Throttling with minimal regression risk.”

“So now we’re considering reducing the timeout to 10 seconds, only for pages considered loaded when they are hidden,” it added.

The tech giant is piloting the feature in its Chrome Canary and Dev versions.

Those wishing to try the feature can do so by enabling a Chrome command line flag:

Download and install the latest version of Chrome Canary or Chrome Dev.
Open the programme and enter chrome://flags/#quick-intensive-throttling-after-loading in the address bar.
Enable the “Quick intensive throttling after loading” flag and relaunch Chrome when prompted.