Browser Tips
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CHROME
Conserve battery life by freezing background tabs
Chrome’s Energy Saver feature, which Google introduced two years ago, is supposed to conserve battery life when you’re using the browser on an unplugged laptop. It works by “limiting background activity and visual effects, such as smooth scrolling on web pages”, which means its energy-saving benefits are negligible.
To make it more effective, Google has updated Energy Saver to freeze background tabs that are using lots of processing power and draining your laptop’s battery. These tabs will be frozen after five minutes of excessive CPU usage, and unfrozen when you click them. Any tabs being used for audio or video calls, or that are connected to other devices via Bluetooth or USB, will not be affected. Tab-freezing works automatically when Energy Saver is active. Click the browser’s three-line menu button and select ‘More tools’, then Performance. Scroll down to the Power section and ensure Energy Saver is switched on (see screenshot 1 below left). You can choose whether to activate it only when your laptop’s battery is at 20 per cent or less, or whenever it’s unplugged from the mains.