Google Chrome will apparently stop sucking all your laptop battery

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If there was ever an award for battery life sucker of the year, Google Chrome would be a permanent top three.

Despite the fact that Google wants you to use its browser, Microsoft the same, there's always been one elephant standing on top of your laptop if you wanted to use Google Chrome: It drains battery like no other browser.

Google has apparently decided it's now time to address this, promising fixes in Chrome 57.

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Google is constantly evolving Chrome to be less power hungry while also offering increased performance, and the latest development arriving in Chrome 57 focuses on power savings from further background tab management. With the latest version, tabs open but not currently in use will be more aggressively throttled to save power.

Essentially Chrome 57 will limit background activity on tabs you're not currently looking at to stop the browser from gobbling up so much power. It all sounds good, and in theory should work, but we'll not sound the party alarm just yet until we've actually seen it live up to its claims.

Richard Devine
Richard Devine
Managing Editor

Richard Devine is the Managing Editor at Windows Central, where he combines a deep love for the open-source community with expert-level technical coverage. Whether he’s hunting for the next big project on GitHub, fine-tuning a WSL workflow, or breaking down the latest meta in Call of Duty, Forza, and The Division 2, Richard focuses on making complex tech accessible to every kind of user. If it’s happening in the world of Windows or PC gaming, he’s probably already knee-deep in the code (or the lobbies). Follow him on X and Mastodon.