Google has updated its Chrome browser to better handle resources and preserve battery life by reducing the drain caused by multiple tabs.
In general, Chrome is one of the fastest system-friendly browsers out there. Yet it can still have an effect on your resources if you keep a lot of tabs open like most of us do. It’s just too tempting at times to keep a bunch of websites on screen, that you frequent each day or need to keep as a reminder to accomplish something. The issues with this is that each website can require a good amount of resources to visit. If you pile enough of them together, all of a sudden your system-friendly browser isn’t so friendly anymore.
Google has adjusted Chrome’s throttling policy, where it will begin to judge certain tabs open after a set amount of time, based on how hard it is working the CPU. It will limit background tabs to 1% of a single core in order to prevent such a leak of resources. It also takes into account what the tab is trying to accomplish. Certain tabs that are running music or certain video tools will not be touched, in order to prevent things from going awry.
These new change come with the new Chrome version 57. To figure out what version you have and trigger an upgrade if the browser hasn’t attempted to do it automatically yet, simply visit the about screen in Chromes’ main menu –> Help –> About Google Chrome.
At Poc Network, we have been using a certain plugin to accomplish a similar task with, known as “The Great Suspender” (Update: We no longer recommend this extension have been removed due to malware placed by its new owners). It is installed on all of the PC’s here and works to suspend tabs that lay dormant for too long. The web page is preserved and remains open, but it is replaced with a placeholder until the user clicks on the page to bring it back. This helps to reduce the amount of resources being consumed by the browser over-all. Now, hopefully with the new change from Google, this may no longer be needed. If anything, it could possibly work as a pair of conditions to improve performance that much further.
