Finally There Is a Hidden Setting That Will Stop Chrome From Draining Your Laptop Battery
Of all the web browsers available these days, Chrome is still the most popular for some reason . Pretty much everyone uses it, and that’s why everyone knows it eats up battery – and the more tabs you open and the more extensions you use, the more power is wasted. While we have tried to help you with workarounds for Chrome’s power limit in the past, they are no longer necessary. Google has finally implemented an official “low power mode” solution that you can turn on in one step.
As reported by How-To Geek , Google dropped the new “Energy Saver” feature at the same time as Chrome 108 was released. When you enable this option, Chrome will conserve battery power by minimizing background activity, visual effects, and frame rate. You will likely notice a performance difference when browsing with these three limited components. Animations and scrolling may feel choppy, and Chrome’s overall speed may slow down. But I’ll agree if that means I can actually work all day long without being tethered to a charger.
However, it’s not clear at this point how much battery life the power saver will actually save since the feature is so new. Still, it seems worth trying, even squeezing a few extra minutes of juice out of my MacBook.
How to Enable Power Saving Mode in Chrome 108
The first step is to update Chrome to at least version 108. If it hasn’t updated automatically, you can force an update on Windows, Mac, or Linux by clicking the three dots in the top right corner and choosing Help > About Google . Chrome . Click “Relaunch” once Chrome has downloaded the update.
Then you’ll have to dig a bit, because Google hasn’t (yet) made a new user-facing option – there’s no obvious battery saver setting; instead, the feature is hidden behind a feature flag. (Google is launching experimental new features as flags that it doesn’t consider ready for the general public, but which are good enough for experimenters. The company warns that enabling the flags can mess up your browser and its data, but power saving seems relatively safe to try.)
If you want to work with Energy Saver, type chrome://flags into the address bar and press Enter. Here, click on the “Search Flags” box and type “battery” to open “Enable Battery Saver Mode Feature in Settings” (it’s the identifying flag “#battery-saver-mode-available”). Click Default, change the setting to Enabled, then click Restart to reload the app. Once Chrome reopens, go to Settings, then click on the new Performance tab to see Power Saving.
From here you have two options. You can either activate power saving when your laptop battery reaches 20%, or you can leave this feature enabled any time your laptop is unplugged. I didn’t take my charger to work today, so I know which option I’ll choose.
This feature will appear as an electrical sheet in the menu bar. You can’t switch between the two power saving modes here, but you can turn it off completely, making it a handy switch if you need it.