Chrome 57 Brings Longer Battery Life on Laptops, 'Read Later' Feature on iOS

Chrome 57 was rolled out last week to Mac, Windows, and Linux users globally bringing several under-the-hood-experiences. However, Google has now noted that one of the significant improvements include prolongation of battery life. This has been achieved by reducing power consumption of background tabs due to better throttling management.

Background tabs tend to consume a third of Chrome's power usage on laptops, and the latest Chrome 57 version will throttle individual background tabs by limiting the timer fire rate for background tabs using excessive power. "Chrome has focused on improving the user experience by throttling tab performance for many years. Like many browsers, Chrome has limited timers in the background to only run once per second. Via the new throttling policy, Chrome 57 will delay timers to limit average CPU load to 1 percent of a core if an application uses too much CPU in background. Tabs playing audio or maintaining real-time connections like WebSockets or WebRTC won't be affected," Google's Software Engineer Alexander Timin notes on the Chromium blog.

This new throttling mechanism results in 25 percent less busy background tabs, inevitably saving overall power consumption. Timin also notes that the end goal is for background tabs to rely on new APIs for service workers to do work in the background.

Chrome 57 for desktop also integrates a two-dimensional grid layout system in the CSS Grid Layout that essentially tries to make the work of the developers easy, while maintaining and supporting designs on various screen sizes - big or small. Apart from this, the new version also fixes as many as 36 vulnerabilities.

Furthermore, as expected, Chrome 57 for iOS is also now rolling out and version 57.0.2987.100 brings along the rumoured Read Later feature - just like the one in Safari. You can find the feature by tapping Share -> Read Later on iOS devices. To save articles for later reading, you can save them by tapping on the three dots in the upper-right corner and then clicking on the Reading List option. Google says that these articles can be read even without an Internet connection as they are saved on your device. The Read Later feature segregates articles into 'Unread' and 'Pages You've Read' options.