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Google starts rolling out fixes to Chrome’s horrendous battery-draining problems

Updated Dec 19th, 2018 9:00PM EST
Google Chrome Laptop Battery Life

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Chrome is somehow both the best and the most utterly broken browser available to Web users today. It’s fast, it’s effective and it makes your computer run like complete garbage, but Google is implementing fixes as quickly as it possibly can to stymie the frustration.

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The latest improvement should help save your laptop battery while you’re out and about. According to the Google Chrome Blog, the Chrome team has been working with Adobe to make pages with rich content, such as Flash, run more efficiently within the browser.

“When you’re on a webpage that runs Flash, we’ll intelligently pause content (like Flash animations) that aren’t central to the webpage, while keeping central content (like a video) playing without interruption,” explains Google.

“If we accidentally pause something you were interested in, you can just click it to resume playback. This update significantly reduces power consumption, allowing you to surf the web longer before having to hunt for a power outlet.”

This new feature is already enabled by default in the latest Chrome desktop beta, but should roll out to regular users as well in the near future. If you want to go ahead and manually enable it, head to Settings > Show advanced settings > Privacy > Content Settings and tick the following bubble:

Google says that more tweaks and improvements like this will be released in the coming months.

Jacob Siegal
Jacob Siegal Associate Editor

Jacob Siegal is Associate Editor at BGR, having joined the news team in 2013. He has over a decade of professional writing and editing experience, and helps to lead our technology and entertainment product launch and movie release coverage.