Chrome 57 Limits Background Tabs Usage To 1% Per CPU Core (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Starting with Chrome 57, released last week, Google has put a muzzle on the amount of resources background tabs can use. According to Google engineers, Chrome 57 will temporarily delay a background tab's JavaScript timers if that tab is using more than 1% of a CPU core. Further, all background timers are suspended automatically after five minutes on mobile devices. The delay/suspension will halt resource consumption and cut down on battery usage, something that laptop, tablet, and smartphone owners can all relate. Google hinted in late January that it would limit JavaScript timers in background tabs, but nobody expected it to happen as soon as last week's Chrome release. By 2020, Google hopes to pause JavaScript operations in all background pages.

Comments

Grammar Nazi to the rescue!

[Pfhorrest]

something that laptop, tablet, and smartphone owners can all relate.

Unless you mean that those people will all testify to the aforementioned something, you're missing either a "to" or a "to which" depending on how pedantic you want to be. Those people don't relate it; they relate to it. It is something they can relate to, or if you want to be fancy, it is something to which they can relate.

Audio and WebSockets defeat this

[tepples]

sometimes I'll listen to a podcast/music in a another tab

Then this does not affect you. From the featured article:

The good news is that background tabs playing audio or maintaining real-time connections like WebSockets or WebRTC won’t be affected by the 1% CPU usage limit.

Re:Blame yourselves....

[CrashNBrn]

It's both. Javascript image transforms are still grossly inefficient compared to any native image tool. Javascript keyboard and mouse hooks can make the whole browser sluggish. Then add in adverts that do all of that on top of possibly inline DOM manipulation. It's a freaking disaster.

Re:Good uses for background

[jfisherwa]

Added a comment above .. but don't want you to miss it .. The Great Suspender extension for Chrome:

https://chrome.google.com/webs...

Re:I just block all of it

[tepples]

Now I just want this feature for firefox

It's not quite the same, but opening about:config and setting privacy.trackingprotection.enabled to true will blacklist a lot of abusive adtech.

Re:Good uses for background

[AmiMoJo]

How much of your quad core 3GHz CPU does the email client need? 1% is still 4x30MHz cores. People used to read email on single core CPUs running under 10MHz, and those cores didn't have advanced features like cache or single cycle multipliers or branch prediction or out-of-order execution.