Microsoft Working On A Fix For Major Google Chrome Browser Battery Drain

When Microsoft decided to move its browser to Chromium, significant changes were bound to happen with Microsoft working on code for Chromium. One of the things that Microsoft is working on improving for Chromium is battery life for devices when users are working away from an outlet. A new experimental feature is in testing that will improve battery life by disabling media caching to disk.

The change lessens disk activity allowing the browser to consume less power. Microsoft had the battery life lead in browsers with Edge, and it is looking to extend its battery life lead to its new Chromium-based browser as well. The idea for the new feature that reduces battery consumption came from Microsoft's Shawn Picket.

Picket proposed the idea to prevent streaming media from being cached where possible. He stated that media content is added to the general HTTP cache during acquisition and playback and brings with it a negative impact on battery life due to the increased disk activity. The change that Picket implemented in the browser prevents the caching of certain media content to the disk to improve the battery life.

The feature is offered in Chrome Canary and is activated using a flag that is called "Turn off caching of streaming media to disk." Chrome Canary users can activate that flag by going to chrome://flags in Canary and searching for the feature to enable it. The experimental feature is available on Chrome Canary for Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, and Android. If the feature works well on the Chrome Canary browser, it will presumably turn up on regular Chrome browsers in a future update. Earlier this week, Google was talking about its Password Checkup feature finding that 1.5% of all website logins were compromised.