Google is working to “dramatically” improve the Chrome browser’s life-long issue with draining MacBook’s battery life, reports The Wall Street Journal.
The report says Chrome will improve “tab throttling” by better prioritizing active tabs and limiting resource drain from tabs open in the background. The move is said to have a “dramatic impact on battery and performance,” following early tests on Mac laptops.
“This is an ongoing investment in improvements to speed, performance, and battery life,” said Max Christoff, director of Chrome browser engineering. Chrome has long been criticized for draining device batteries, hogging of RAM, and its lack of user privacy. Google has promised over-and-over to fix these issues but has so far not shown much in the way of progress.
Google in May announced its plans to lessen Chrome’s hit on battery life by blocking resource-heavy ads, and by limiting the resources an ad can use before a user interacts with it. Chrome will also soon receive optimizations to improve the app’s performance-critical portions of the software to improve performance.
Google is reportedly working on and testing the changes, with an eye towards releasing the improvements to Chrome sometime near the end of August.