More efficient Google Chrome for Mac OS X coming soon.

June 15, 2015 at 12:07 IST | 3 Minute Read

by Amarjeet Singh Mudhar

If you ever happened to use Chrome on Windows and then on Mac, you’d notice there is a sea of difference between the two. While it is arguably the best browser to use on Windows, on OS X it feels like a bloated mess that just burns through your battery at an astonishing rate for no good reason.

It seems Google is well aware of this issue, so it is working on improving the efficiency of the OS X version. In a Google+ post, Google engineer clarified on a few things the company is doing to improve battery life on Mac.

Chrome also incurs higher CPU wakes and CPU usage while using Safari user agent compared to using Safari, which will now be dropped by 66% and fewer CPU wakes and usage, making it on par with Safari.

The other technical changes to Chrome for OS X are outlined as follows:

• 
  The team has been working on addressing this; here are some cases that have recently been improved on trunk:
  http://crbug.com/460102
• 
  
  Before: Renderers for background tabs had the same priority as for foreground tabs.
  Now: Renderers for background tabs get a lower priority, reducing idle wakeups on various perf test, in some cases by significant amounts (e.g. 50% on one test).
  http://crbug.com/485371
• 
  
  
  Before: On a Google search results page, using Safari's user agent to get the same content that Safari would, Chrome incurs ~390 wakes over 30s and 0.3% CPU usage vs. Safari’s 120 wakes over 30s and 0.1% CPU usage.
  Now: 66% reduction in both timer firings and CPU use. Chrome is now incurring ~120 wakes over 30s and 0.1% CPU use, on par with Safari.
  http://crbug.com/489936
• 
  
  Before: On capitalone.com, Chromium incurs ~1010 wakeups over 30s vs. Safari's ~490 wakes.
  Now: ~30% reduction in timer firings. Chrome is now incurring ~721 wakeups over 30s.
  http://crbug.com/493350
• 
  
  Before: On amazon.com, Chromium incurs 768 wakups over 30s and consumes ~0.7% CPU vs. Safari's 312 wakes over 30s and ~0.1% CPU.
  Now: ~59% reduction in timer firings and ~70% reduction in CPU use. Chrome is now incurring ~316 wakeups over 30s, and 0.2% CPU use, on par with Safari at 312 wakes, and 0.1% CPU use."
  

Hopefully, the updates are released soon, along with other improvements to reduce memory usage.