Google Is Finally Working On Fixing Chrome’s Battery-Draining Bug

Have you noticed that if you’re working on the road, at uni or out of the office for the day, that Google Chrome uses a little more power than it should? A tiny bug that has been an ongoing issue for the last two years is finally being worked on by Google’s Chromium development team, which when solved — fingers crossed — could boost your laptop’s battery life by up to 25 per cent.

Image via Shutterstock

Pointed out to use by MaximumPC, the issue rests with the fact that Google Chrome’s interpretation of the system clock tick rate, which influences the task scheduler that switches computer components like the CPU in and out of low- and full-power states to run background processing tasks. Where Windows 7’s default tick rate is around 15ms, an oversight in Chrome’s coding means that if any of a number of prerequisites are filled — if a laptop is plugged into AC power, or if a Web page with Flash is loaded, for example — the browser changes its tick rate to 1ms.

When this happens, the system’s CPU doesn’t have enough time to enter its low-power energy-saving state before ramping back up for the next tick cycle, massively impacting battery life. 7500 people have marked the issue as important in Google’s ticketing system for the Chromium project over the last 22 months, but as of January this year Google’s dev team have taken a renewed interest and as of July especially there are a lot of changes — with someone within Chromium taking on ownership of the issue on July 14, hopefully to actually fix it once and for all. [Google Code]


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