Google Chrome could soon get a battery-saving feature

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Google’s Chrome will soon get a battery-saving feature to allow its users to peruse the browser for longer. Google is expected to test Microsoft’s battery-saving feature for Chrome users.

One of the major contributing factors to Chrome’s battery usage issue is video streaming. Microsoft has already attempted to solve this for the Chromium-based browser through a battery-saving feature. This prevents media content from being cached to disk, thus consuming less power. Microsoft has also improved this feature to activate the power saving feature when a device running on the battery is detected.

As per a report in Hindustan Times, Microsoft’s Shawn Pickett said, “Keeping the disk active during this process increases power consumption in general and can also prevent certain lower-power modes from being engaged in the operating system. The potential disadvantage is that the caching behavior can now be different depending on whether the device is connected or not. Since the entire change is under a feature key, the idea is to verify that the reduction in media caching does not lead to any discernible difference in user-facing functionality between the scenarios during the testing trials”

The company added a commit to the Chromium project last year for Chromium-based browsers which prevented media content from caching to disk. A new commit has now been added to verify if the device is running on battery and not on AC power. Therefore, the commit will currently work only for battery-operated devices, such as laptops and desktops would remain unaffected by this change.