Elain Brown Tech 07.11.2022 03:Jul AM EDT

Google is Testing a Feature That Reduces CPU Use to Extend Battery Life

Google is working on a new feature that will help extend battery life, Quick Intensive Throttling.

Google is testing the new feature called "Quick Intensive Throttling," which cuts the amount of time spent by the CPU by 10 %.

This feature is also designed to increase the amount of time that laptops and mobile devices may go without needing to be recharged.

Testing this new feature, Google discovered that Chrome's CPU consumption dropped by as much as five times and that its battery life increased by as much as 85 minutes.

In Chrome 87, after a tab has been suspended and hidden from view for more than 5 minutes, Google's Intensive Wake Up Throttling feature stops JavaScript from waking up the tab more than once a minute.

It enables a function that is known as "Quick intense timer throttling of loaded background pages" and further increases the JavaScript timer access on background pages.

Google's Quick Intensive Throttling Feature

Google explained the feature as, "The JS timer Intensive Wake Up Throttling feature has been shipped in 86, which will align the timer wake-ups to a 1-minute interval after a grace period of 5 minutes."

The five-minute delay is carefully set so that Intensive Wake Up Throttling may be implemented with as little danger of regression as possible.

Therefore, the web developers are contemplating cutting the timeout down to ten seconds, and doing so just for pages that are regarded as loaded when they are hidden.

This feature is only applicable to those pages that fall under the purview of the initial Intensive Wake Up Throttling feature and simultaneously complete loading when they are put into the background without any audio being played.

Google added, "With this feature, the grace period before 1 minute throttling will be 10 seconds instead of 5 minutes for pages in the scope above."

Google's Operation of its New Feature

As explained by About Chromebooks, this adjustment will slow down the execution of JavaScript that is running in the background on web pages and will wake it up.

These are the tabs that users have open, but they are not actively looking at or engaging with them. For example, users might have this tab open.

In practice, there is a window of opportunity of five minutes in between wakeups for JavaScript code on a web page.

The Chromebook's central processing unit (CPU) uses up more of the available battery life whenever the code is permitted to run more frequently.

Therefore, restricting the amount of time the code can run, often known as "throttling," will result in a lower total consumption of energy.

How To Enable the Quick Intensive Throttling Feature

As reported by BleepingComputer, this feature is now on testing in Google Chrome's developer versions and Chrome Canary. However, if users wish to try the new feature by themselves, they can.

1. Make sure to enable the Chrome flag to access this feature.

2. Next, download the latest version of Google Chrome for Developers or Chrome Canary.

3. After installing, open Chrome Developer or Chrome Canary, type and enter in the search bar this, chrome://flags/#quick-intensive-throttling-after-loading.

4. Lastly, set up the "Quick intensive throttling after loading" to enable the new feature in the device, then select "relaunch" once Google Chrome prompts it.

After the feature is enabled successfully, users will find that their Chrome uses less CPU on their device than usual, and a significant increase in battery life will be noticed.