Microsoft Plans to Reduce Chromium Battery Usage

Google Chrome – Battery Usage Is High

Google Chrome is a popular web browser in the world due to its fast speed and multiple features. However, you have to admit that it is a notorious battery and resources hog since it will reduce the performance of your Windows computer. Some of you even say that Chrome draining battery.

Many people have realized this fact and they want to find a way to reduce Chromium battery usage. When you search for Chrome battery saver on the internet, you will find that there are various solutions to solve this issue.

The posted solutions include updating Chrome, suspending the related tabs, removing unnecessary extensions, stopping Chrome running in the background, and more. Of course, these Chrome battery savers can work temporarily. But, they don’t change the high battery usage nature of it fundamentally.

The effective solution to reduce Chromium battery usage is to change the relative performance. Google doesn’t make such a modification, but Microsoft does this job.

Microsoft Reduces Chromium Battery Usage in Edge

Microsoft Edge has become a Chromium-based browser since 2019. To beat Google Chrome, Microsoft develops its Edge with many new features which are not included in Chrome. To reduce Chromium battery usage is a big improvement.

To be specific, Microsoft has found a way to improve the battery life of your laptop when streaming media content in Chromium-based browsers on Windows 10.

According to some posts, Microsoft is going to avoid some unnecessary ‘Media Caching’ to reduce the battery consumption of Chrome. The Microsoft engineer also posted a bug file online, showing that currently media content is added to the general HTTP cache during acquisition and playback.

This behavior has a negative effect on the battery life of your laptop because the disk is always active in this situation, which increases the power consumption to some extent. At the same time, there is another downside: it can even prevent some certain lower-power modes from working in the operation system.

How to reduce Chromium battery usage? Microsoft plans to stop the streaming media content from being cached to disk where possible. This can improve your laptop battery backup when you are using the Chromium browsers.

In a Github post, Improving Battery Life by Avoiding Unnecessary Media Caching, which has been there for a month, Microsoft explains that this change can not only reduce the laptop power consumption during media playback but also reduce the positive effect on functions that may rely on disk caching.

What does this mean? Here, we will show you an example: when you forward or rewind a video clip by a second, you will see that the performance of seek time is highly improved.

[SOLVED] How to Recover Deleted Videos from Laptop Effectively

Do you know how to recover deleted videos from laptop in an easy and effective way? In fact, you can use MiniTool software to do this job now.

Read More

Meanwhile, the following message will be added to Chromium when this function is enabled:

Turn off caching of streaming media to disk – Reduces disk activity during media playback, which can result in power savings.

Research from Microsoft indicated that due to these changes, a 62mW improvement and disk write activity also decreased by 309KB/sec. Microsoft also showed that these changes can supply a net positive result and reduce the power consumption for mainline scenarios.

Microsoft made this test on a laptop that is using battery only by streaming 1080p media content on it.