Google is testing a new "Quick Intensive Throttling" feature in Chrome that reduces CPU usage by 10%, thus extending battery life on laptops and devices.
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In Chrome 87, Google introduced a new feature called “Intensive Wake Up Throttling” that prevents JavaScript from activating a tab more than once a minute after it has been suspended and hidden from view for more than 5 minutes.
With this change, Google found that it reduced Chrome's CPU usage by up to 5x and extended battery life by up to 1.25 hours.
Google is now testing a new feature called "Quick Intensive Timer Throttling," which reduces the 5-minute grace period to 10 seconds, allowing many more tabs to quickly reduce CPU usage and extend battery life.
“The JS timer Intensive Wake Up Throttling (Doc) feature has been released in 86, which will align timer wakeups to 1 minute intervals after a 5 minute grace period,” explains a document about the new Quick Intensive Throttling feature.
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“The 5 minute timeout is very conservative and was chosen to allow the initiation of Intensive Wake Up Throttling with minimal risk of regression.“
“So now we are considering reducing the timeout to 10 seconds, only for pages that are considered loaded when hidden..”
The new feature is being tested in Chrome Canary and Dev builds, and you can try it out by enabling a Chrome flag using the following instructions:
- Install the latest version of Chrome Canary or Chrome Dev.
- Open Chrome Canary or Developer and enter chrome://flags/#quick-intensive-throttling-after-loading in the address bar.
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- Set the “Quick intensive throttling after loading” flag to Enabled and restart Chrome when prompted.
Once you enable the Quick intensive throttling after loading setting, you should find that Chrome uses less CPU on the device and that the overall battery life is extended on your device
