Google announced today that newest Chrome update now lets MacBook owners squeeze out more productivity out of their browsing sessions. In other words, if you're a macOS user, you can surf the web for much longer than ever before. Say hello to more battery life!
Google tested the newly optimized Chrome on an 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro (2022); it discovered that the laptop endured a browsing session for 17 hours and a YouTube-watching marathon for 18 hours. Win!
How did Google improve macOS' battery life on Chrome?
Google tinkered with Chrome's under-the-hood operations to maximize browsing sessions on a single charge. Some of the tweaks and optimizations the search-engine giant made consist of the following:
- Fine tuning memory compression heuristics and garbage collection for iFrames. This begets lower energy consumption to reduce short-term memory usage.
- Improving the way Javascript timers are fired in Chrome to reduce the frequency in which the CPU wakes up. After all, Javascript timers are one of the greatest culprits of power consumption for web pages, so Google pulled out all the stops to ease its burden on the CPU.
- Streamlining structures of data. Google tracked down data structures in which "there were frequent accesses with the same key and optimized their access pattern," Chrome Software Developer François Doray said in a press release.
- Getting rid of unnecessary style, layout, paint, raster and GPU steps. Google used a bot on real-world sites to identify Document Object Model (DOM) pattern changes that add zero value to the pixels on the screen — and eliminated them to optimize Chrome's UI.
To squeeze out even more battery life out of your MacBook, you can take advantage of Chrome's Energy Saver mode, too. Although Google tested the new-and-improved Chrome on the M2 13-inch MacBook Pro, the company says that other Macs should see performance gains, too.
Google admits there's "more work to be done," but it's one-step closer to making Chrome a power-efficient paradise.
