Chrome tweaked to improve memory use & battery life on MacBook

Image Credit: Google

With the changes, Google says Chrome users can now browse the internet for 17 hours or watch YouTube for 18 hours on a 13-inch M2 MacBook Pro on a single charge.

If users enable Energy Saver mode in Chrome, they can gain up to 30 minutes longer browsing time on battery. According to Google, users with older MacBooks should see performance gains, too.

Google also shared some of the ways they've made improvements to Chrome. By tweaking the way Javascript timers fire, Chrome doesn't cause the computer to wake up as often.

Chrome has also changed the way it handles iframes, resulting in less energy consumed and reducing short-term memory usage.

For those interested, the changes are explained in the Chromium blog here.

In December, Google announced that passkeys were supported in Chrome, a security feature companies are adopting to try to replace passwords.