Battery-extending Intensive JavaScript Throttling now available in Edge Canary

We reported recently that Google was experimenting with throttling the Javascript wake-up timer in Chrome to significantly extend battery life.

The same feature is now available in Edge Canary Build 86.0.569.0.

The new #intensive-wake-up-throttling setting has the following description:

Throttle Javascript timers in background
When enabled this feature causes Javascript timers in background tabs to be aggressively throttled and coalesced, running no more than once per minute after a page has been backgrounded for 5 minutes or more.This is a web standards compliant feature, but it may break functionality on some websites by causing certain actions to be delayed by up to a minute. However, it results in significant CPU and battery savings when enabled.

In Google’s testing when the company loaded 36 random background tabs and had a blank foreground tab battery life increased by 28%, and when Google had a 36 random background tabs and a foreground tab playing a YouTube video (a more realistic scenario) battery life still increased 13% (36 minutes) over no throttling.

The #intensive-wake-up-throttling flag is off by default and can be toggled under edge:/flags.

Via WBI