After the release of Google Chrome 57 for desktop last week a new post on the Chromium blog indicates that it came with big improvements to battery life. In the release, Chrome throttles individual background tabs by limiting the "timer fire rate for background tabs using excessive power" resulting in 25% fewer busy background tabs.
In the post, Alexander Timin, a software engineer at Google, said:
“Chrome has focused on improving the user experience by throttling tab performance for many years. Like many browsers, Chrome has limited timers in the background to only run one per second. Via the new throttling policy, Chrome 57 will delay timers to limit average CPU load to 1% of a core if an application uses too much CPU in [the] background. Tabs playing audio or maintaining real-time connections like WebSockets or WebRTC won’t be affected.”
Google says that its aim in the long term is to have all background tabs fully suspended and instead rely on APIs for service workers to do work in the background instead.
Chrome 57 also brings a nifty little feature to iOS. Under the ‘Share’ menu, users will find an option to read later, pressing this will download the page so that it can even be viewed offline. The reading list on Chrome for iOS does not yet sync up to the desktop client.
Source: Chromium Blog via TechRadar