Google's Chrome browser is often criticised for its impact on mobile device battery life. However, Google is aware of this short falling and has been working on improving the energy efficiency of its browser for at least the last year. Yesterday it published a Chrome Blog post about how over the last 12 months Chrome has delivered double-digit improvements in device battery life, and in speed.
Google says it looked at the most popular sites when measuring Chrome browser energy consumption. Sites like Vimeo, Facebook and YouTube, featuring lots of video streams all use less battery than a year ago. In the video example, embedded below, you can see identical Microsoft Surface Book computers playing Vimeo videos – the newest version of Chrome provides 2hr 12m more watch time on a single charge.
People visit lots of other sites that aren't video-heavy and these show improved battery life too, says Google. According to Google's own tests "Chrome for Mac now uses 33 percent less power for everything from videos and images to simple page scrolling".
Another Chrome browser boast on the official blog concerns browsing speed. Using tools such as Speedometer Google has measured improvements to Chrome's browsing speed of 15 per cent over the last year (on both PC and Android). Combined with the greater battery life the speed boost could really help Chrome browser users get more from their browsing sessions.
Back in June Microsoft published a browser battery life shootout – with Edge as the winner obviously. It looks like Google wasn't ready for a direct reply to that challenge at this time but it's still commendable that it has improved battery life by a double digit percentage over the past year.
