. To prolong battery life, Chrome should minimize power impact from things users can’t see. This includes background tabs, which consume a third of Chrome's power usage on desktop. Starting in version 57, Chrome will throttle individual background tabs by limiting the timer fire rate for background tabs using excessive power.

Efficient power usage is an important aspect of speed, one of

Chrome has focused on improving the user experience by throttling tab performance

for many years

. Like many browsers, Chrome has limited timers in the background to only run once per second.

Via the new throttling policy

, Chrome 57 will delay timers to limit average CPU load to 1% of a core if an application uses too much CPU in background. Tabs playing audio or maintaining real-time connections like WebSockets or WebRTC won’t be affected.