Chrome has always been a power consuming monster, but over the years Google has made a bunch of changes to reduce the toll it takes on your system — including an Energy Saver mode. But changes to Chrome’s Canary build are teasing the possibility of some big Energy Saver upgrades, which could help boost efficiency even further.
Chrome’s Canary build is the experimental version of the browser, where Google tests new features and updates long before they arrive on the stable or beta versions of the official Chrome browser. But that also means it can be a good indicator of what Google wants Chrome to be able to do, and the kind of upgrades we may say several months down the line.
Leopeva64, posting on X, found flags relating to a number of these potential upgrades, allowing for a little bit more customization of how Chrome’s Energy Saver mode works. Specifically the ability to “freeze CPU intensive background tabs” while the mode is switched on. An additional flag also lets users test this feature by forcing all tabs to behave like a CPU-intensive tab.
In the past Leopeva64 also uncovered settings that let you set how aggressive Energy Saver Mode will be, with options for Moderate, Balanced and Maximum energy saving modes. According to the menu text, these settings relate to how long it takes for tabs to become inactive. The more aggressive the energy saving, the less time it takes to essentially shut down those tabs and make users reload them from scratch.
Both of these are rather useful features to have in a browser like Chrome. The problem with the browser is that each individual tab is essentially its own window, and as long as it stays active it’ll keep eating up resources — gobbling RAM and using up power. So by giving users the ability to tell Chrome when those tabs should be put to sleep, it lets them gain some modicum of control over how Chrome tabs are treated. Giving them the choice between efficiency and ensuring all their tabs can reopen as fast as possible.
Likewise, being able to identify which tabs are taking up the most resources, and actively preventing them from doing so unless absolutely necessary, should offer a major reduction in power consumption. Because who needs those resources being drained when they’re not actually being used?
Canary isn’t designed for the majority of people, but it is available to download and use if you want to check out these features for yourself — and are happy with the fact they may not work correctly. The rest of us can just wait until these features make their way to the official version of Chrome. Assuming they ever do, that is.
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