Chrome's Battery Problem
Google Chrome has a problem with laptops. Beyond the occasional performance quirks, the Mountain View browser demands a sacrifice in the form of battery life. Even Microsoft placed pressure on this point by promoting Edge, and developers have worked for a long time to correct the situation. After what was its formal announcement in September of last year, version 57 of Google Chrome now includes a throttling system for background tabs, so that they no longer claim more than 1 percent of the CPU.
The landscape of modern browsers is lamentable. Right now I'm running an instance of Firefox, and another of Chrome. The Mozilla browser has decided to devour a total of 977 megabytes of RAM for three tabs and two extensions, which it refuses to give back. On the other side, Chrome still suffers existential crises every time I do a bit of scrolling on portals like Facebook. The result is a sort of toxic break dance that uses 50 percent of a four-core processor, and no command in the flags section or extension in the store helps with this. Another very serious problem that Google's browser suffers is battery consumption on laptops. No matter the model or operating system, Chrome squeezes batteries as if they were oranges.
How Chrome 57 Throttles Background Tabs
The engineers discovered that many pages consume a large number of CPU cycles even when they are on a background tab. With the arrival of Chrome 57, that behavior is going to change. The key is a new throttling system based on a budget (measured in seconds) to which each background tab is subjected once 10 seconds have passed. That budget regenerates (with a factor of 0.01 seconds per second), but the background tab will only be able to access the so-called wall time of the CPU (wall time is the real time a process needs to start and complete its task) as long as it hasn't exhausted its budget. In other words, the average consumption for a background tab will be 1 percent of the CPU.
Exceptions and Future Plans
The main exceptions to throttling are tabs that play audio (since they are automatically considered in the foreground), and those that maintain real-time connections through WebRTC or WebSockets. The Chromium team reports a reduction in "busy tabs" of 25 percent, and on certain sites, the decrease in CPU usage can reach 75 percent. Of course, what we need now are much more solid measurements from users, who will have to check if this translates into longer battery life. But the story doesn't end there. By 2018, the total suspension of background tabs will be sought.
