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Chrome To Introduce Timer To Throttle Background Pages (ghacks.net)

Google plans to roll out a change in Chrome Stable soon that will have the browser throttle timers in background tabs to improve battery life and browsing performance. From a report: The motivation behind the chance is that some pages consume a lot of CPU when they are in the background. Google mentions JavaScript advertisements and analytics scripts explicitly but it is not limited to that. The core idea is to limit the processing power that background tabs get in Chrome once the feature lands. (1) Each WebView has a budget (in seconds) for running timers in background. (2) A timer task is only allowed to run when the budget is non-negative. (3) After a timer has executed, its run time is subtracted from the budget. (4) The budget regenerates with time (at rate of 0.01 seconds per second). (5) The only pages that appear to be exempt from the throttling are those that play audio.

3 of 122 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Apple Called... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Safari purges tabs in the background all the time saving enormous amounts of processing, yet it reloads them far too frequently as well wasting even more.

  2. Re:Stop those css popups by omnichad · · Score: 4, Informative

    Right-click, inspect element. Look down. Right click, delete element. Done.

  3. Re:"throttle" to ZERO by Altrag · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you're using Chrome, check out an addon call The Great Suspender (maybe it exists in FF too, I haven't checked.) Its been a lifesaver for a tab hoarder like me.