Battery-extending Intensive JavaScript Throttling now available in Edge Canary
1 min. read
Updated July 6th, 2020
Published July 6th, 2020
Share this article
Improve this guide
Read the affiliate disclosure page to find out how can you help MSPoweruser effortlessly and without spending any money. Read more
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
