Chrome Browser Draining PC Batteries for Years

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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May 9, 2000
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Think back two years ago and remember if your laptop or tablet battery started to drain much quicker using Chrome. Beginning with version 22, (Chrome is now on 36) a bug was introduced into the source code and never addressed. Can’t blame Windows this time, lay the blame directly on Google.

Windows users are advised to keep their eyes on Google's Chrome Releases blog for word of a fix.
 
I can see it now, Microsoft blames Chrome for bad battery life. Everyone switches over to Windows 8, especially the XP users.

Instead of waking up the processor every 15.625ms, Chrome tells Windows to have it wake up every 1.000ms. So while your PC normally wakes up the processor 64 times per second when it's idle, as long as you have Chrome running, the processor wakes up 1,000 times per second.
So you mean that 1000 times per second worse than 64? I don't know, waking the processor at all will do the trick. Let's say you mighty internet?

browser_battery4.png

NOPE! Makes no difference what so ever. It's funny cause they used a Dv7, which I still have and use. Seems like everything but IE useless more power than Chrome. Even IE Touch uses more than just IE.
 
I really don't care, IE is the only brower I've been hacked with. Since switching to chrome no hacks. Chrome seem to keep most bad stuff inside it's browser. Sure it will lock up the browser, but it doesn't get out.
 
I really don't care, IE is the only brower I've been hacked with. Since switching to chrome no hacks. Chrome seem to keep most bad stuff inside it's browser. Sure it will lock up the browser, but it doesn't get out.
or so you think...
 
To be fair, this is mostly an issue for smaller capacity battery devices like tablets and the 1ms polling choice matters now because Chrome sticks out as a larger cause of reducing battery life.

On a typical system, the processor wakes up far more often than every 16ms, as it services hundreds of threads doing system management at any one time. So in practice it doesn't make too much of a difference for most systems.

Google should make polling a configurable option, but 1ms polling isn't terrible for most non-tablet devices.
 
I can see it now, Microsoft blames Chrome for bad battery life. Everyone switches over to Windows 8, especially the XP users.


So you mean that 1000 times per second worse than 64? I don't know, waking the processor at all will do the trick. Let's say you mighty internet?

browser_battery4.png

NOPE! Makes no difference what so ever. It's funny cause they used a Dv7, which I still have and use. Seems like everything but IE useless more power than Chrome. Even IE Touch uses more than just IE.

Google has already acknowledged it as a problem and has someone working on it. Personally I would rather see someone test it with powercfg and a sleepstudy rather than peacekeeper.
 
^^^
It sure is.

FWIW, I use Chrome extensively at work... I have 8GB of ram... I've seen Chrome use as much as 5GB before. I realize I am leaving it open all day, using it for calendaring(Google Calendar) and Gmail, as well as listening to Slacker radio... but seriously?? 5GB of ram? Super heavy.
 
This explains why my batteries always dropped like a balloon with a stone tied to it. I finally completely eradicated chrome from all my devices.
 
This is by design. The additional memory used is a trade-off for the extra per-process security.

What security would that be? Even their process per tab approach is fake, mon. Once a tab stalls, the whole browsers stalls.
 
I can't tell if I'm being lured into a joke, or if you are being serious. :confused:

I can't answer for him, but i know Chrome uses a ton of processes. Each tab and plugin gets a process. I usually have about 15 chrome based processes running.
 
Yet still a better choice than IE.

I suppose I might care more if I used a tablet, but I use a desktop and laptop so really it doesn't affect me. I tend to use FF more on the laptop in general though anyhow.
 
I just noticed this the other day. Chrome momentarily pegs your CPU, over and over, even while idle. If you use CPUZ, you can watch your CPU throttle up and down.
 
Two fucking years? And what did they do? I just don't get it.

Makes sense though I always see Chrome doing funky shit with my resources. This better get fixed. Would it be better to use Firefox for now until this is fixed if you wanna eek out a bit more from your battery?
 
Doesn't matter what they did for two years, chrome always has the smallest footprint, is always the fastest while firefox is always slow and has memory leaks even without plugins. ;)
 
I only use Chrome for work.. It's a resource hog & I would never install it on my personal computer. I only use IE on my home computer, cracks me up how many people hate on IE. Works just fine for me becuase I don't break it.
 
Well, it's back to Waterfox. :D


I tried to use WaterFox, I really did but unless I have missed it, it hasn't updated in what, 2 years? The last time I used it was running on FF low teen something..Many of my vital add-ons wouldn't work with it, so it was back to regular FF..

Doesn't matter what they did for two years, chrome always has the smallest footprint, is always the fastest while firefox is always slow and has memory leaks even without plugins. ;)

FF isn't slow for me, but then again my sig rig is faster then 99% of the personal systems worldwide..I've had FF open (with about ~35 tabs) for a week and stream Pandora nearly nonstop and I am currently using a whopping 3.5GB of my oh so small 16GB:p...
 
I only use Chrome for work.. It's a resource hog & I would never install it on my personal computer. I only use IE on my home computer, cracks me up how many people hate on IE. Works just fine for me becuase I don't break it.

Same here, I only use IE and have little issues with it. What few web based interfaces that I deal with that don't like IE 11 also don't normally like newer versions of firefox so it is less about not liking IE and more about them not liking something about new browsers.

But overall, as an end user no issues using IE since many years ago.
 
Doesn't matter what they did for two years, chrome always has the smallest footprint, is always the fastest while firefox is always slow and has memory leaks even without plugins. ;)

I find the exact opposite, Chrome is massive on my SSD (especially compared to Firefox), takes a lot of RAM, firefox has done very well to reduce the RAM usage.

Not to mention the fonts on chrome looks awful on high resolution screens.

I might try FF again
 
One day, they're going to bring Google Fiber to Madison.

And I won't get it no matter how much I want it because fuck Google.
 
What security would that be? Even their process per tab approach is fake, mon. Once a tab stalls, the whole browsers stalls.

That is not correct. I've seen tabs stall while other tabs chug on regardless.
 
As a web developer I prefer Chrome over Firefox. I prefer chrome's inspect element/developer tools over FF and IE by a long shot.
 
What security would that be? Even their process per tab approach is fake, mon. Once a tab stalls, the whole browsers stalls.

The Process Per Tab thing is being used by IE too. Wonder if FF does the same?
 
Chrome will never get out of beta, apparently, and you can't turn GoogleUpdate off without uninstalling Chrome, so Chrome is not anything that I use. The killer feature for me that keeps me in Firefox is ZoomTextOnly. It's difficult to understand why IE doesn't seem to offer any comparable feature, but what this does is allow me to blow-up the text on any web page (ctr- +) without, at the same time, blowing up any images on the page, like .jpg or .bmp or .png, etc. Few things look worse, imo, than magnified images on web pages...;)
 
One day, they're going to bring Google Fiber to Madison.

And I won't get it no matter how much I want it because fuck Google.

On the bright side as soon as Google says they are coming into an area everyone else there scrambles to get their speeds up so in the end you can still make out well which another ISP.

Chrome will never get out of beta, apparently, and you can't turn GoogleUpdate off without uninstalling Chrome, so Chrome is not anything that I use. The killer feature for me that keeps me in Firefox is ZoomTextOnly. It's difficult to understand why IE doesn't seem to offer any comparable feature, but what this does is allow me to blow-up the text on any web page (ctr- +) without, at the same time, blowing up any images on the page, like .jpg or .bmp or .png, etc. Few things look worse, imo, than magnified images on web pages...;)

IE had had that feature since always, or atleast IE 5, haven't used anything before that to know if it was there in 1 - 4 or when it was added. You don't seem to be able to set it through the simplified menu, but if you bring up the menu bar, go to view, text size. There you can set just the size of text on the page. Which is what you are talking about.

while not as friendly as ctrl + which is now as of IE 8 used for full page zoom if you do alt v this brings up the view menu regardless if you have the menu bar there or not, x for text size. then a (smallest), s (smaller), m (medium), l (larger), g (largest) would select your size. it is a few more keys
 
If only there was something we cold run on our computers, some sort of system that could control the operating of other programs and resources ... that didn't blow.
 
A friend was also said google drive was using a bit of CPU even at idle.
 
As a web developer I prefer Chrome over Firefox. I prefer chrome's inspect element/developer tools over FF and IE by a long shot.

It's a tossup, firebug is more sluggish than Chome's developer tool, but then Firefox shines in other ways.
 
On the bright side as soon as Google says they are coming into an area everyone else there scrambles to get their speeds up so in the end you can still make out well which another ISP.

That gave me good feels! Thanks! :D
 
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