Microsoft has embraced Chromium engine for its Edge browser. But inclining towards Chromium doesn’t mean that it would only enhance the Web browsing experience on Microsoft’s offering, it’s likely to bring some improvements to Google’s Chrome as well. One of those appears to be the development to address ongoing battery usage concerns on Chrome browser. A Chrome engineer has revealed that Google is implementing the changes suggested by Microsoft to improve battery usage on its browser. The Redmond company is claimed to have made over 1,900 contributions to the Chromium project across areas such as accessibility and modern input including touch, speech, and digital inking.
As noticed by Windows-focussed blog Windows Latest, Microsoft’s senior software engineer Shawn Pickett submitted a commit for approval last week that was aimed to help Chrome developers reduce battery usage of the browser by avoiding unnecessary media caching. The commit has been taken into consideration by the Chrome team.
Pickett while describing the proposed implementation mentioned that Google needs to add a check to verify if the device is running on battery and is not connected to AC power to change the caching behaviour.
“Since the entire change is under a feature key, the idea is to verify that the reduction in media caching does not lead to any discernible difference in user-facing functionality between the scenarios during the testing trials,” the engineer wrote in the commit.
Additionally, he specified that what Chrome requires to improve battery usage is to compare the HTTP response content size to the backend maximum file size. “If the content size is larger than the maximum file size, then we will not cache the content. This check is outside of the power check and feature flag, so we do this in all cases,” Pickett explained.
A Chrome engineer, who goes by the pseudonym “Chrome Cunningham” on the Chromium platform, has confirmed that Google is planning to consider the suggestions made by the Edge engineer and kick off the engineer in Chrome.
That being said, Google is yet to detail the changes that it would impose to optimise battery usage on Chrome.
Last week, Microsoft made its Edge browser based on Chromium out of preview and provided its download package for both Windows and macOS users. The company was previously relying on EdgeHTML browser engine, though it decided to move to the open-source development in December 2018.