9 ms·

New Chrome features to save battery and make browsing smoother

73 points by taubek 4y ago

brody_hamer 4y ago
I just really want a way to pause JavaScript. Or dial down its CPU access. So many times a page has an infinite paint loop that sucks 100% of a cpu core, and I with I could just… turn the dial down a bit to save the battery. Here’s hoping that energy saver lives up to its name.
pohl 4y ago
H/T to Safari for raising the expectations.
humbleharbinger 4y ago
Memory saver seems to long have been a feature offered by extensions like the great tab suspender.
- sofixa 4y ago
  Which was acquired by a suspicious company and started releasing new versions not based on the public GitHub repo, so with who knows what. Most people migrated off it for that reason.
zitterbewegung 4y ago
This is a good step in the right direction. I believe Chrome has used lots of battery and CPU to just focus on speed.
WesSouza 4y ago
If Safari is the new IE, Chrome is the new Windows. Feels weird to have the performance control inside an application, instead of it following what has been set by the OS.
- masklinn 4y ago
  Is it? OS are general-purpose system, it's always been the case that applications being known workload they had better knowledge of what they need (it just doesn't matter to most of them). That's why you can tune your db configuration, or you can police individual processes using various tunables, or you can ship your program with a better allocator than f'ng glibc malloc. And a modern browser is a pretty complicated process manager, the OS has no understanding of what the various processes do or what state they're in.
causi 4y ago
Is this really going to do a lot? My tab suspension needs are covered pretty well by browser/PC reboots. I don't reboot if there's something I'm actively using and tabs I'm not using never get loaded after I bring the browser back up.
- thfuran 4y ago
  My most recently purhased laptop may not have ever been rebooted. I don't remember whether it ended up getting rebooted once while I was setting things up. I'm sure I'll end up rebooting it eventually, but it's not exactly an everyday thing.
ipsum2 4y ago
> Any inactive tabs will be reloaded when you need them. Anyone have ideas why the tab's memory contents can't be offloaded to SSD and restored instead? Personally I don't like losing state (e.g. filled in forms, scroll position, deleted posts, etc) from using other extensions like Great Suspender.
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  Just a guess but probably something to do with running states in the background but connected to external thingies, hard to offload and restore as-is if the external thingies (or the local one) detect timeouts. Easier to just reload the URL than bother to restore an unusable webpage's state I suppose.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    OTOH this is already an issue with you sleep / suspend the machine itself
  - yetanother-1 4y ago
    Don't forget that reloading through the networks gives Google the ability to keep tracking. The requests will go only to that URL, but Google will get it one way or another...
    - jonatanheyman 4y ago
      Why would Google need a reload to keep tracking (they already control the browser)? That this feature/implementation was driven by desire for more tracking sounds far fetched to me.
- masklinn 4y ago
  1. it's a ton of data 2. it's very messy data, it's a bunch of seas of nodes (the DOM, the JS heap, the styling info, etc...) 3. I wouldn't be surprised if it was data which isn't fully isolated (e.g. shared style caches), meaning it first has to be fully forked to resolve into a self-contained bundle OS have the ability to just freeze and store / restore memory, but I'm not sure they give that capability to use processes.
pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
Great. Now awaiting JavaScript frameworks and their users to eat up those savings thrice.
criddell 4y ago
A good ad blocker also saves battery. Not loading ads will also help the page load faster and that definitely smooths out the experience.
- rpastuszak 4y ago
  Which is another reason to try a browser not owned by an advertising business. From the perspective of Google, your browser or your phone are just ad spaces.
  - criddell 4y ago
    Google sells ads, so no Chrome. Since they are the primary force behind Chromium, does that mean no Chromium-based browsers? Apple sells ads, so that rules out Safari. Microsoft sells ads, so no Edge or Internet Explorer. Mozilla sells ads, so no Firefox. Brave sells ads, so no Brave. What’s left? Lynx?
    - turbobooster 4y ago
      He said owned by an advertising company. Read it again. None of the companies you listed are owned by an advertising company. Your post is written as if you work for Google and you need to defend them.
    - pajko 4y ago
      Ungoogled Chromium, LibreWolf, Iceraven, Bromite
    - rpastuszak 4y ago
      I feel like this line of thinking is unnecessarily binary. Think of it this way: what percentage of the revenue of each of these businesses comes from advertising? Where can you put your (understandably) limited trust given the limited list of options? There's a huge difference between the incentives of Alphabet and, _say_, Mozilla from the revenue source pov.
      - 4y ago
rpastuszak 4y ago
If you haven't done this in some time and use a Mac, give Safari a shot. From the performance and energy usage perspective, it's wonderful. I switched more than 3 years ago and never looked back. The only thing that feels sluggish are the Google web apps (FUD in my opinion). I've been doing front-end dev for almost 20 years and now use Chromium very rarely and only in work related context. I'm at the risk of sounding naive here, but using any browser that is not Chrome makes the world a slightly better place (just a tiny bit), same goes with helping your non-techie friends do the same. (yes, I know Safari is not perfect, but Chrome is cancer/storefront and it is one often things that make use collectively a tiny bit more stupid)
- calo_star 4y ago
  Safari's UI just isn't good for me.
  - lmedinas 4y ago
    The UI is ok, the major issue with Safari is to not have uBlock.
- frereubu 4y ago
  I'd be happy using Safari, but the deal-breaker for me is the lack of uBlock Origin. There are other suggestions that people mention - Ghostery and Wipr for example - but somehow they don't give me confidence that they're going to be as reliable.
  - acdha 4y ago
    I use a hosts file on macOS and Firefox Focus’ content blocker on iOS. It works quite well except for YouTube and I pay for that.
  - ImprovedSilence 4y ago
    Couldn’t agree more. I tried to switch to safari awhile back, and loved most of the interface, the snappiness, the open tab view for people like that open a gazillion tabs. But the ads I struggled to get rid of (specifically YouTube commercials) pushed me back to chrome with ublock.
fathyb 4y ago
If you ever want to debug/mess with the memory saver you can look at "chrome://discards". Chromium already discarded tabs when the system memory pressure was high, what the memory saver brings is a smarter policy [0]. For example, tabs that are inactive for more than two hours will be automatically discarded now. [0] https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chrome/browser/performance_manager/policies/high_efficiency_mode_policy.cc https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...
zozbot234 4y ago
"Memory saver" and "battery saver"? How about just disable JavaScript by default. Make it opt-in per tab with a banner alert for the user: "this site may drain your battery".
- ruuda 4y ago
  Nothing stops you from disabling javascript by default already; I do it for security reasons. A nice side effect is that many cookiewalls disappear too.
codedokode 4y ago
They are moving in the right direction. Browser vendors should optimize for low memory usage and not for speed in bechmarks at the cost of memory usage, because when the system runs out of memory everything becomes so slow that benchmark performance doesn't matter anymore. The only people who win from benchmark optimization are those with 16-32 Gb of RAM (for example, Google employees). So I would rather choose a browser with 2x-3x lower benchmark performance if it could consume 2x-3x less memory. Firefox is basically unusable on a 2Gb system as long as you useit more than 15 minutes. One of the solutions could be to freeze and compress background tabs. There is no need to keep in memory HTTP caches, localstorage, heavy JIT caches, CSS selector dependency trees, JS bytecode, DOM nodes without JS expandos attached. Freezing background tabs also allows to save energy.
- mananaysiempre 4y ago
  > The only people who win from benchmark optimization are those with 16-32 Gb of RAM (for example, Google employees). Limiting RAM has become a silly market segmentation tactic, and I’d say there is absolutely no reason to buy a PC with less than 16 GB of RAM these days. It’s downright stupid you can still buy machines with 6 GB. Better to buy several generations down or used—old CPUs are still perfectly serviceable unless you’re planning to submit to some serious C++/Rust compiler punishment. (Says the person with an 8GB dual-core Haswell that is showing definite signs of obsolescence, but I still stand by my words.)
  - eyko 4y ago
    Is it also downright stupid that people still use computers with 4 GB of RAM for browsing? Asking for a friend.
    - codedokode 4y ago
      4 Gb is not enough for browsing, at least with Firefox on Linux with more than 10 tabs.
      - 4y ago
CGamesPlay 4y ago
Glad to see that Chrome is putting effort into these areas. Battery is definitely the important one to me and it's disappointing that "throttling slow code after we've burned 80% of your battery" is the only thing that they're releasing here, but hopefully we'll see some future posts that actually improve the situation.
pajko 4y ago
Firefox can do this also via an extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc... and it makes wonders, just needs some tweaking based on the use case.
anaisbetts 4y ago
Glad to see Chrome grabbing these two great features from Edgium which has had them for quite some time
aboringusername 4y ago
I really don't think this captures the scope of the problem. Here's an example: 1: Load NBC.com (or any other regular media site) in a "naked" web browser (just a plain browser, no ad blocking, noscript etc) 2: Open dev tools -> networking tab 3: Study the activity, look at requests made, size of requests, data the requests contain (remember, YOU are paying for these requests in terms of impact to battery, bandwidth, electricity usage etc) I can see MB's of data transferred from my device, every time I scroll more network activity is performed (100's of requests per MINUTE), this is all made possible by "JS" which is the single biggest resource hog of any modern browser. Turning JS off (whilst obviously crippling some pages) results in HUGE savings of bandwidth, reducing battery impact AND increasing privacy :). (You can also use noscript to allow/deny certain scripts from loading, and you'll be surprised how many pages work with JUST the root domain enabled, thus every third party script is not vital to the functioning of the page) I seriously think modern browsers (including Firefox) need to implement features to reduce the amount of network requests a page can make, including to third party websites, and limit the amount of data a single page can consume. I'd call it a "browser firewall" similar to tracking mode, preventing third party requests entirely Data does cost, contrary to what others make think, especially on mobile lines when out and about. So yeah, let's fix that first.
crazygringo 4y ago
What does this do about page state like half-filled in forms? Since I upgraded a couple days ago, I'm seeing that indeed every tab completely reloads when I switch to it if I haven't used it in a few hours. But now I'm kinda worried that I'll leave something half-written and it'll be gone. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to test that in advance without waiting a few hours. I also often rely on a long article being scrolled halfway through to save my place, or a long video I'm in the middle of, and I'm worried that my spot will be lost as well. I find it extremely odd that they're not even mentioning anything about that -- e.g. whether you will lose data/place and you should disable this feature if that's unacceptable, or whether it does some fancy stuff to restore the state of anything that's a form, contenteditable, scroll position, or playback location.
- basch 4y ago
  The reason I open a tab is to load the page state. When I click to the tab, the last thing I want is a reload. There should be a middle ground that can pause all resource use, and then resume it, without reloading state. Google, Amazon, Twitter, Youtube subframe/embeds are resource hogs.
joemaller1 4y ago
Was this backported from Microsoft’s work on Edge or were those energy-saving features just proof-of-concept?
wintermutestwin 4y ago
I've used Total Suspender on Firefox for a few years now. It has whitelist/blacklist, ignore pinned and sound playing tabs. Works great for the most part. It is a bit annoying that youtube vids lose the timestamp, but youtube is a massive hog so it is a worthwhile tradeoff.
kyriakos 4y ago
Weren't these features added to Edge over a year ago? What took Google so long?

73 points by taubek 4y ago

I just really want a way to pause JavaScript. Or dial down its CPU access. So many times a page has an infinite paint loop that sucks 100% of a cpu core, and I with I could just… turn the dial down a bit to save the battery. Here’s hoping that energy saver lives up to its name.

pohl 4y ago

H/T to Safari for raising the expectations.

humbleharbinger 4y ago

Memory saver seems to long have been a feature offered by extensions like the great tab suspender.

sofixa 4y ago
Which was acquired by a suspicious company and started releasing new versions not based on the public GitHub repo, so with who knows what. Most people migrated off it for that reason.

zitterbewegung 4y ago

This is a good step in the right direction. I believe Chrome has used lots of battery and CPU to just focus on speed.

WesSouza 4y ago

If Safari is the new IE, Chrome is the new Windows. Feels weird to have the performance control inside an application, instead of it following what has been set by the OS.

masklinn 4y ago
Is it? OS are general-purpose system, it's always been the case that applications being known workload they had better knowledge of what they need (it just doesn't matter to most of them). That's why you can tune your db configuration, or you can police individual processes using various tunables, or you can ship your program with a better allocator than f'ng glibc malloc. And a modern browser is a pretty complicated process manager, the OS has no understanding of what the various processes do or what state they're in.

causi 4y ago

Is this really going to do a lot? My tab suspension needs are covered pretty well by browser/PC reboots. I don't reboot if there's something I'm actively using and tabs I'm not using never get loaded after I bring the browser back up.

thfuran 4y ago
My most recently purhased laptop may not have ever been rebooted. I don't remember whether it ended up getting rebooted once while I was setting things up. I'm sure I'll end up rebooting it eventually, but it's not exactly an everyday thing.

ipsum2 4y ago

> Any inactive tabs will be reloaded when you need them. Anyone have ideas why the tab's memory contents can't be offloaded to SSD and restored instead? Personally I don't like losing state (e.g. filled in forms, scroll position, deleted posts, etc) from using other extensions like Great Suspender.

johnchristopher 4y ago
Just a guess but probably something to do with running states in the background but connected to external thingies, hard to offload and restore as-is if the external thingies (or the local one) detect timeouts. Easier to just reload the URL than bother to restore an unusable webpage's state I suppose.
- masklinn 4y ago
  OTOH this is already an issue with you sleep / suspend the machine itself
- yetanother-1 4y ago
  Don't forget that reloading through the networks gives Google the ability to keep tracking. The requests will go only to that URL, but Google will get it one way or another...
  - jonatanheyman 4y ago
    Why would Google need a reload to keep tracking (they already control the browser)? That this feature/implementation was driven by desire for more tracking sounds far fetched to me.
masklinn 4y ago
1. it's a ton of data 2. it's very messy data, it's a bunch of seas of nodes (the DOM, the JS heap, the styling info, etc...) 3. I wouldn't be surprised if it was data which isn't fully isolated (e.g. shared style caches), meaning it first has to be fully forked to resolve into a self-contained bundle OS have the ability to just freeze and store / restore memory, but I'm not sure they give that capability to use processes.

pwdisswordfish9 4y ago

Great. Now awaiting JavaScript frameworks and their users to eat up those savings thrice.

criddell 4y ago

A good ad blocker also saves battery. Not loading ads will also help the page load faster and that definitely smooths out the experience.

rpastuszak 4y ago
Which is another reason to try a browser not owned by an advertising business. From the perspective of Google, your browser or your phone are just ad spaces.
- criddell 4y ago
  Google sells ads, so no Chrome. Since they are the primary force behind Chromium, does that mean no Chromium-based browsers? Apple sells ads, so that rules out Safari. Microsoft sells ads, so no Edge or Internet Explorer. Mozilla sells ads, so no Firefox. Brave sells ads, so no Brave. What’s left? Lynx?
  - turbobooster 4y ago
    He said owned by an advertising company. Read it again. None of the companies you listed are owned by an advertising company. Your post is written as if you work for Google and you need to defend them.
  - pajko 4y ago
    Ungoogled Chromium, LibreWolf, Iceraven, Bromite
  - rpastuszak 4y ago
    I feel like this line of thinking is unnecessarily binary. Think of it this way: what percentage of the revenue of each of these businesses comes from advertising? Where can you put your (understandably) limited trust given the limited list of options? There's a huge difference between the incentives of Alphabet and, _say_, Mozilla from the revenue source pov.
    - 4y ago

rpastuszak 4y ago

If you haven't done this in some time and use a Mac, give Safari a shot. From the performance and energy usage perspective, it's wonderful. I switched more than 3 years ago and never looked back. The only thing that feels sluggish are the Google web apps (FUD in my opinion). I've been doing front-end dev for almost 20 years and now use Chromium very rarely and only in work related context. I'm at the risk of sounding naive here, but using any browser that is not Chrome makes the world a slightly better place (just a tiny bit), same goes with helping your non-techie friends do the same. (yes, I know Safari is not perfect, but Chrome is cancer/storefront and it is one often things that make use collectively a tiny bit more stupid)

calo_star 4y ago
Safari's UI just isn't good for me.
- lmedinas 4y ago
  The UI is ok, the major issue with Safari is to not have uBlock.
frereubu 4y ago
I'd be happy using Safari, but the deal-breaker for me is the lack of uBlock Origin. There are other suggestions that people mention - Ghostery and Wipr for example - but somehow they don't give me confidence that they're going to be as reliable.
- acdha 4y ago
  I use a hosts file on macOS and Firefox Focus’ content blocker on iOS. It works quite well except for YouTube and I pay for that.
- ImprovedSilence 4y ago
  Couldn’t agree more. I tried to switch to safari awhile back, and loved most of the interface, the snappiness, the open tab view for people like that open a gazillion tabs. But the ads I struggled to get rid of (specifically YouTube commercials) pushed me back to chrome with ublock.

fathyb 4y ago

If you ever want to debug/mess with the memory saver you can look at "chrome://discards". Chromium already discarded tabs when the system memory pressure was high, what the memory saver brings is a smarter policy [0]. For example, tabs that are inactive for more than two hours will be automatically discarded now. [0] https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chrome/browser/performance_manager/policies/high_efficiency_mode_policy.cc https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:chr...

zozbot234 4y ago

"Memory saver" and "battery saver"? How about just disable JavaScript by default. Make it opt-in per tab with a banner alert for the user: "this site may drain your battery".

ruuda 4y ago
Nothing stops you from disabling javascript by default already; I do it for security reasons. A nice side effect is that many cookiewalls disappear too.

codedokode 4y ago

They are moving in the right direction. Browser vendors should optimize for low memory usage and not for speed in bechmarks at the cost of memory usage, because when the system runs out of memory everything becomes so slow that benchmark performance doesn't matter anymore. The only people who win from benchmark optimization are those with 16-32 Gb of RAM (for example, Google employees). So I would rather choose a browser with 2x-3x lower benchmark performance if it could consume 2x-3x less memory. Firefox is basically unusable on a 2Gb system as long as you useit more than 15 minutes. One of the solutions could be to freeze and compress background tabs. There is no need to keep in memory HTTP caches, localstorage, heavy JIT caches, CSS selector dependency trees, JS bytecode, DOM nodes without JS expandos attached. Freezing background tabs also allows to save energy.

mananaysiempre 4y ago
> The only people who win from benchmark optimization are those with 16-32 Gb of RAM (for example, Google employees). Limiting RAM has become a silly market segmentation tactic, and I’d say there is absolutely no reason to buy a PC with less than 16 GB of RAM these days. It’s downright stupid you can still buy machines with 6 GB. Better to buy several generations down or used—old CPUs are still perfectly serviceable unless you’re planning to submit to some serious C++/Rust compiler punishment. (Says the person with an 8GB dual-core Haswell that is showing definite signs of obsolescence, but I still stand by my words.)
- eyko 4y ago
  Is it also downright stupid that people still use computers with 4 GB of RAM for browsing? Asking for a friend.
  - codedokode 4y ago
    4 Gb is not enough for browsing, at least with Firefox on Linux with more than 10 tabs.
    - 4y ago

CGamesPlay 4y ago

Glad to see that Chrome is putting effort into these areas. Battery is definitely the important one to me and it's disappointing that "throttling slow code after we've burned 80% of your battery" is the only thing that they're releasing here, but hopefully we'll see some future posts that actually improve the situation.

pajko 4y ago

Firefox can do this also via an extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc... and it makes wonders, just needs some tweaking based on the use case.

anaisbetts 4y ago

Glad to see Chrome grabbing these two great features from Edgium which has had them for quite some time

aboringusername 4y ago

I really don't think this captures the scope of the problem. Here's an example: 1: Load NBC.com (or any other regular media site) in a "naked" web browser (just a plain browser, no ad blocking, noscript etc) 2: Open dev tools -> networking tab 3: Study the activity, look at requests made, size of requests, data the requests contain (remember, YOU are paying for these requests in terms of impact to battery, bandwidth, electricity usage etc) I can see MB's of data transferred from my device, every time I scroll more network activity is performed (100's of requests per MINUTE), this is all made possible by "JS" which is the single biggest resource hog of any modern browser. Turning JS off (whilst obviously crippling some pages) results in HUGE savings of bandwidth, reducing battery impact AND increasing privacy :). (You can also use noscript to allow/deny certain scripts from loading, and you'll be surprised how many pages work with JUST the root domain enabled, thus every third party script is not vital to the functioning of the page) I seriously think modern browsers (including Firefox) need to implement features to reduce the amount of network requests a page can make, including to third party websites, and limit the amount of data a single page can consume. I'd call it a "browser firewall" similar to tracking mode, preventing third party requests entirely Data does cost, contrary to what others make think, especially on mobile lines when out and about. So yeah, let's fix that first.

crazygringo 4y ago

What does this do about page state like half-filled in forms? Since I upgraded a couple days ago, I'm seeing that indeed every tab completely reloads when I switch to it if I haven't used it in a few hours. But now I'm kinda worried that I'll leave something half-written and it'll be gone. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to test that in advance without waiting a few hours. I also often rely on a long article being scrolled halfway through to save my place, or a long video I'm in the middle of, and I'm worried that my spot will be lost as well. I find it extremely odd that they're not even mentioning anything about that -- e.g. whether you will lose data/place and you should disable this feature if that's unacceptable, or whether it does some fancy stuff to restore the state of anything that's a form, contenteditable, scroll position, or playback location.

basch 4y ago
The reason I open a tab is to load the page state. When I click to the tab, the last thing I want is a reload. There should be a middle ground that can pause all resource use, and then resume it, without reloading state. Google, Amazon, Twitter, Youtube subframe/embeds are resource hogs.

joemaller1 4y ago

Was this backported from Microsoft’s work on Edge or were those energy-saving features just proof-of-concept?

wintermutestwin 4y ago

I've used Total Suspender on Firefox for a few years now. It has whitelist/blacklist, ignore pinned and sound playing tabs. Works great for the most part. It is a bit annoying that youtube vids lose the timestamp, but youtube is a massive hog so it is a worthwhile tradeoff.

kyriakos 4y ago

Weren't these features added to Edge over a year ago? What took Google so long?