Google Chrome is known for its excessive consumption of RAM and battery. Now to mitigate battery drain due to Chrome, Google is experimenting with a feature.
As per reports, Google is testing with a meta tag that will allow websites to run in a power-saving mode. Currently, the battery-savings meta tag feature is part of Chrome’s Origin Trials and is not likely to be formally tested until the Chrome 86 or 87 versions.
This feature is intended to enable site operators to recommend an energy-saving browsing mode using a simple meta tag. The webmaster can either request a reduced frame rate, a reduced script speed, or both.
It is easy to use. As a webmaster, if you want your website to allow reduced framerate, then add this meta tag to the page:
<meta name="battery-savings" content="allow-reduced-framerate">
If a site wanted to allow generic slowdown of script execution, then use this meta tag:
<meta name="battery-savings" content="allow-reduced-script-speed">
And the combination of both would look like this:
<meta name="battery-savings" content="allow-reduced-framerate allow-reduced-script-speed">
The tag combination could also be switched on or off via a CSS media query depending on the energy-saving settings of the site:
@reduced-framerate {
* {
animation: none !important; /* or change animations to use keyframes optimized for battery-savings */
}Google recommends the use of battery-savings meta tags for generally demanding websites such as video and video conferencing services that have become much more important in the corona crisis.
This is also a good test field because Chrome has been known for years as a power guzzler. With Microsoft Edge based on Chromium, which has now moved up to second place on the browser top list, Google is under pressure to innovate on its own territory.
