Google is working on the battery issues users have complained about when using the Chrome for OS X browser. The company is working to improve the performance of the browser, attempting to bring it up to Safari levels.
Google senior software engineer Peter Kasting this week announced that his team has been working to address Chrome for OS X battery hog complaints by improving the performance of the browser on Mac, especially in areas where Safari appears to do better (via iPhoneHacks).
The team has brought multiple under the hood improvements to Chrome, such as requiring significantly less CPU usage when loading various websites. Other technical changes to the browser are as follows:
“The team has been working on addressing this; here are some cases that have recently been improved on trunk:
Before: Renderers for background tabs had the same priority as for foreground tabs.
Now: Renderers for background tabs get a lower priority, reducing idle wakeups on various perf test, in some cases by significant amounts (e.g. 50% on one test).
Before: On a Google search results page, using Safari’s user agent to get the same content that Safari would, Chrome incurs ~390 wakes over 30s and 0.3% CPU usage vs. Safari’s 120 wakes over 30s and 0.1% CPU usage.
Now: 66% reduction in both timer firings and CPU use. Chrome is now incurring ~120 wakes over 30s and 0.1% CPU use, on par with Safari.
Before: On capitalone.com, Chromium incurs ~1010 wakeups over 30s vs. Safari’s ~490 wakes.
Now: ~30% reduction in timer firings. Chrome is now incurring ~721 wakeups over 30s.
Before: On amazon.com, Chromium incurs 768 wakups over 30s and consumes ~0.7% CPU vs. Safari’s 312 wakes over 30s and ~0.1% CPU.
Now: ~59% reduction in timer firings and ~70% reduction in CPU use. Chrome is now incurring ~316 wakeups over 30s, and 0.2% CPU use, on par with Safari at 312 wakes, and 0.1% CPU use.”
These changes will, of course, show up first in Google’s Chromium browser before going live on Chrome for OS X. We’ll keep our eyes out for the official release of Chrome for OS X with these improvements included.
