Mozilla"s CEO may have his reservations about Microsoft"s jumping onto the Chromium bandwagon, but the change has resulted in a number of positives for users of both Google"s and Microsoft"s browsers.
The latest such change comes with respect to Chromium-based browsers" excessive battery drain. As Microsoft"s engineers recently pointed out, Chromium browsers tend to exhibit excessive caching of data to the disk when dealing with media. And just a week after Microsoft raised a possible fix, Google has already added a flag to the latest Chrome Canary build that implements that very fix in the company"s browser.
The new flag is called "Turn off caching of streaming media to disk" and is available for macOS, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS and Android. As a Google engineer explains, "This change will prevent the caching of certain media content to disk for the purpose of improving device battery life for users." He also notes that Chrome"s current behaviour can also prevent your mobile device from entering low-power modes, further aggravating the pernicious effects Google"s browser can have on your laptop"s battery life.
You can enable the feature, which is turned off by default, by inputting "chrome://flags" in the address bar and searching for "caching" among the flags.
Source: Chromium Gerrit via TechDows