Chrome To Start Limiting Background JavaScript Timer Wake Ups

Chrome Will Be Going On A Diet!

Chrome’s love of devouring available RAM is well known and the subject of more than a few internet jokes.  There are a variety of reasons for this immense appetite and today we have learned that Alphabet might be doing something to curb one of those sources, javascript in background tabs.   This feature will start with Chrome 86 and will limit javascript timer wake ups on your background tabs to once per minute.  That change will suppress scripts intended to track your mouse movements, advertisement interaction or even just forced refreshes similar to how Safari currently functions.

Their tests showed an increase in battery life of 28% with 36 tabs open, with the active page being about:blank to demonstrate just how much juice those background tabs consume.  This should also reduce the memory usage of background tabs, though you will still have to deal with the way it treats extensions.  Obviously, if you don’t tend to have several dozen tabs open at the same time you will not see the same increase in battery life but if you do have several open it will still help a bit.

Enterprise admins will be able to change this setting, if they so desire and the one refresh a minute should not impact pages dependant on WebSockets or long polls.  Scripts which are delayed by this process will be flagged in the dev console to help you if you do encounter issues.  You can get more information on what these changes mean, how to get it now and when to expect it rolled out to everyone over at Slashdot.