Chrome 57 Gets Background Tab Throttling

Google Chrome on desktop doesn’t really place any restrictions on what inactive tabs can do. On the other hand, Chrome on Android is capable of heavily throttling and even killing background tabs. Many would have wanted the browser to offer the same functionality on desktop as well and they will be happy to know that now it does. The latest version of Chrome comes with the ability to throttle background tabs.

The company actually planned to introduce this feature on Chrome 56 but it decided against this decision after concerns emerged that it would break a significant number of web pages. This feature is now included in Chrome 57.

What Chrome 57 does is assign a time budget in seconds to every background time. The timer starts after a tab is in the background for ten seconds. When the timer runs the run time is automatically subtracted from the assigned budget.

This time budget will regenerate continuously and the current rate has been set at 0.01 seconds per second but Google does say that it could be tweaked in future releases. Google also points out that background tab throttling will not apply to tabs that are playing audio or have real-time connects like WebSockets and WebRTC.

The company mentions that this feature brings a 25 percent reduction in busy background tabs and laptop users will particularly notice the battery-saving effects of this feature.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Computers
Tags: Google, google chrome