Google Working On Fix For Chrome Browser Bug That Drains Laptop Batteries
Does your laptop battery seem to give up the ghost a little bit quicker when you use Google's Chrome browser to surf the web? You're not alone -- this is a known issue that's been around since at least 2010, though it's largely been swept under the rug. Until now, that is. Google has vowed to fix the issue, and to fix it soon.
Even though this has been a problem for the past several years, it went largely unnoticed by the general public until more recently when Forbes contributing writer Ian Morris shed some light on the topic. According to Morris, the culprit is that Chrome doesn't fully let go of the system processor and set it to an idle state when there's nothing going on; instead, Chrome assigns a system clock tick rate of 1 millisecond. This makes the system wake far more often than it needs to.
The default system clock tick rate is 15.625ms, which means the processor wakes just 64 times per second to see if there are any events that require its horsepower. According to Microsoft, whose Internet Explorer browser doesn't have this same issue, a tick rate of 1ms could increase power consumption by as much as 25 percent.
That's a problem, and though it's been an ongoing bug report in Chromium, Google is finally on the case. The search giant told PCWorld that it assigned the bug internally and that its Chrome team is actively working on a fix at this very moment.
Even though this has been a problem for the past several years, it went largely unnoticed by the general public until more recently when Forbes contributing writer Ian Morris shed some light on the topic. According to Morris, the culprit is that Chrome doesn't fully let go of the system processor and set it to an idle state when there's nothing going on; instead, Chrome assigns a system clock tick rate of 1 millisecond. This makes the system wake far more often than it needs to.
The default system clock tick rate is 15.625ms, which means the processor wakes just 64 times per second to see if there are any events that require its horsepower. According to Microsoft, whose Internet Explorer browser doesn't have this same issue, a tick rate of 1ms could increase power consumption by as much as 25 percent.
That's a problem, and though it's been an ongoing bug report in Chromium, Google is finally on the case. The search giant told PCWorld that it assigned the bug internally and that its Chrome team is actively working on a fix at this very moment.
