Microsoft's new feature should fix the battery drain on Chromium-based web browsers

Microsoft has always prided itself in battery consumption on Edge and the company even published test results after major updates like the Anniversary Update, Creators Update and October Update. However, the company stopped publishing results since they made the switch to Chromium framework as they were the ones undermining it in the first place.

Microsoft did, however, published several changes to the Chromium database to improve it for everyone and not just Microsoft Edge. The biggest problem that Chromium-based browsers face at the moment is battery drain and Microsoft did take advantage of it when they were competing against the framework. However, after the switch happened, the company started working on the problem and published a potential solution on GitHub last month.

According to Microsoft, the real culprit behind the issue is media caching and the company did propose changes to limit it in order to save battery life. Once the change was approved, companies could implement it into their browsers and that’s what Google did. The latest Google Canary update comes with a flag “Turn off caching of streaming media to disk” which reduces disk activity during media playback to improve battery life.

Google Chrome Canary is currently at v 78.0.3885.0 which includes the new feature. At the moment, the feature is only available on Chrome Canary and there is no word on when it will be available on other browsers including Chromium-based Edge.

Via Techdows