Google Chrome’s going to throttle background tabs in the quest for longer laptop battery life.
Google is bumping up Chrome’s battery-saving chops once again with Chrome 57, which started rolling out to users last Thursday. Beginning with Chrome 57 , the browser will limit how often a website’s JavaScript functions can run when its tab is not in focus for the user.
In other words, the activity of background tabs is going to be throttled. The only exception to the new policy will be sites playing audio or anything that requires real-time interactivity via WebRTC and WebSockets. These special cases will continue to operate as normal so that the user experience is not compromised.
Google says that background tabs can consume up to a third of the browser’s power usage on desktop PCs—though laptops would clearly receive the most benefit from this tweak.
