Is Chrome Sucking The Life Out Of Your Laptop's Battery?

[exfileme]

A Chrome for Windows bug can drain a laptop's battery.

Is Chrome Sucking The Life Out Of Your Laptop's Battery? : Read more

 

[abhinav_mall]

Can anyone do this analysis for Chrome iOS app....!!!!!!

 

[Amdlova]

i know this bug... memory incrase too if u leave open a tab. chrome fails in non days

 

[velocityg4]

If you want to severely reduce battery usage of Firefox or Chrome. Run adblock plus and flashblock. That way you aren't eating up resources on ads and idiotic Flash content. Then just enable Flash content on a case by case basis.

You could also run Noscript in Firefox to really minimize the CPU hogging garbage. To be honest it becomes a pain to deal with.

 

[back_by_demand]

Must usd all that extra power uploading your personal data to Google advertisers

 

[TechyInAZ]

That's bad, maybe that's the reason why Chrome is one of the fastest browers out there, since it consumes more energy, that is why it's faster.

 

[JoeyDee86]

I have a Surface Pro 1 with the Power Cover. I get typically 6-9 hours of normal use per charge with it. 4-5 hours of gaming via Steam's In-Home Streaming.

When I used to use Chrome to watch baseball games on MLB.tv, my Surface would get hot, high CPU usage, and i'd barely get 2-2.5 hours. I thought it was just mlb.tv. I started using Metro IE... I was able to watch 2 games back to back without it being hot to the touch.

Needless to say, I'm not using Chrome on battery anymore...

 

[TheAshigaru]

Any idea if this could affect Opera as well? Since it's a Chromium-based browser?

 

[JoeyDee86]

Chrome is a fork of Chromium just like Opera is

 

[danwat1234]

That's bad, maybe that's the reason why Chrome is one of the fastest browers out there, since it consumes more energy, that is why it's faster.

It's also because it can have a core working on each tab to render it instead 1 core doing the HTML rendering for all tabs like in Firefox

 

[CerianK]

To my knowledge, this issue affects Windows only and I have been aware of it (and the issue with Chrome) for about a year. Use a command line utility like ClockRes (to be safe only get it from Microsoft Technet) to explore this behavior. Microsoft has a developers document on the subject called 'Timers, Timer Resolution, and Development of Efficient Code'.

Firefox v30.0 will go to 1ms after a New Tab is opened and then drop back to 10 or 15.625ms after a minute as long as a video isn't started. Tabs that contain a playing video seem to stay at 1ms even if the video is paused. Once the tab has been closed, then a minute later it will go back to 15.6 (notice not 15.625).

IE9 will go to 10ms, even during video playback, but I have not looked at newer versions of IE to know how they behave.

Standalone video players may have the same behavior while they are running, even if not playing a video.

 

[zubikov]

I can confirm that this is a very real issue. I've been noticing for the past year that my 2012 MB Air gets about 3.5 hrs of use when only moderately browsing the web using Chrome as opposed to about 5.5 hrs when using Safari. If you have Chrome open on OS X 10.0 you can easily see how it eats up more power than all of the other background processes combined.

I'm really surprised that of all browsers, Chrome would lag this badly it power efficiency. I have seriously began to use Safari as an everyday browser on my laptop, even though I wouldn't dream of doing so on a desktop. Sometimes having 6 -7 hrs of battery life is more important than a tab loading 20ms quicker.

 

[coolitic]

And since when do browsers use much battery for a laptop?

Phones maybe, but generally a browser would not consume that much power compared to other things in a laptop.

 

[CerianK]

And since when do browsers use much battery for a laptop?

Phones maybe, but generally a browser would not consume that much power compared to other things in a laptop.

I have no idea about the issue with iOS devices, but with Windows, if the timer interrupt keeps firing faster than normal the CPU will never reach idle.