Chrome is a great desktop browser, no doubt but it has an infamous trait: A proper resource hog. When you load the application, it is both taxing to the CPU and the RAM and we have to live with it since it is such a great browser although there are options out there.
Google knows all too well about this issue and now they have a solution for Chrome’s notorious flaw. “Starting in version 57, Chrome will throttle individual background tabs by limiting the timer fire rate for your background tabs using excessive power,” they explained in a blogpost. “Chrome 57 will delay the timers to limit average CPU load to 1% of a core if an application uses too much CPU in the background.”
This means when you are using the new Chrome version, the CPU will be woken up less hence reduced power consumption. They found out that this throttling mechanism done by this version of Chrome would lead to 25% fewer busy background tabs. However, tabs playing audio or maintaining real time connections won’t be affected.
This is a welcome update to a lot of people out there since Google Chrome is used by over 58% of Internet users according to Net Market Share. Chrome has been ridiculed by the likes of Microsoft where they pitted it against their own Edge browser and by Opera where they described a test that Chrome failed terribly. This is also good news for our poor CPUs which have been subjected to constant wake cycles when running Chrome.
