Google’s web browser has more than half the market share, but that hasn’t stopped Chrome from consuming battery of Windows 10-powered devices. Unlike other browsers, Chrome is both resources and energy intensive, but Microsoft recently proposed a solution that could address the battery backup concerns of Chrome users.

In August 2019, Microsoft said it’s possible to reduce Chrome’s battery usage by eliminating the unnecessary disk caching when watching videos. Shawn Pickett, a senior software engineer at Microsoft, explained that caching during video playback keeps disk in an active state, and it apparently uses power.

The second commit has revealed that Microsoft’s implementation will add a check to verify that the device is running on battery and is not connected to AC power.

“Since the goal is to improve battery life, this scopes the change so that it doesn’t impact scenarios when the device is connected to power,” the commit reads.

Another change has been introduced to compare the HTTP response content size to the backend maximum file size and it will not cache the content when size is larger than the maximum file size.

Browsers battery usage

It looks like the Google Chrome team is finally planning to begin experimenting with Microsoft’s power saver feature. A Google Chrome engineer, who goes by alias ‘Chrome Cunningham’ on the Chromium platform, confirmed that Google is planning to kick off the experiment in Chrome.

Microsoft Edge’s engineer yesterday submitted the commit for approval and commit is now active.

It’s not clear when and how Google plans to test the battery saver feature, but the company is likely to experiment it with Chrome Canary users first before pushing it out to everyone.

Microsoft’s contribution to Chromium

Microsoft Edge made more than 1,600 code contributions to the open-source Chromium project in 2019 alone. Some of those contributions include accessibility, touch, PWAs, memory usage, and several other improvements.

Microsoft Edge comes with its own exclusive features such as Collections and as well as customizable and informative start page options.

About The Author

Mayank Parmar

Mayank Parmar is an entrepreneur who founded Windows Latest. He is the Editor-in-Chief and has written on various topics in his seven years of career, but he is mostly known for his well-researched work on Microsoft's Windows. His articles and research works have been referred to by CNN, Business Insiders, Forbes, Fortune, CBS Interactive, Microsoft and many others over the years.