Your Chromebook Could Get a Longer Battery Life with Upcoming Update

Chromebooks offer a much longer battery life than the average Windows machine, but there’s still room for improvement. The upcoming Chrome OS 105 update introduces new browser optimizations will the intent of saving extra battery life.

Most browsers put inactive tabs to “sleep,” which is a cute way of saying that they disable or throttle tabs you aren’t actively using. This reduces the CPU load of inactive tabs, frees up some RAM, and preserves battery life.

Your Chromebook automatically throttles a tab’s JavaScript code after five minutes of inactivity. The code isn’t fully disabled, so you can quickly pick up where you left off without refreshing an old tab. But waiting five minutes just to throttle JavaScript activity doesn’t make much sense—so, Chrome OS will take a more aggressive stance.

As discovered by About Chromebooks, the Chrome OS 105 Dev contains a new flag for “quick intensive throttling after loading.” This flag throttles JavaScript applications on websites after 10 seconds of inactivity.

This feature should reduce JavaScript power consumption by around 10%. That’s not a huge number, but it could lead to a noticeable difference in battery life if you keep a ton of tabs open at once. Those who only use a few tabs at a time may not see a change in battery life.

Note that the “quick intensive throttling” flag is only available in Chrome OS 105 Dev. It will take a few months for Chrome OS 105 to exit the Developer channel and reach regular users.