Google said it’s rolling out under-the-hood improvements to the latest version of Chrome that will make it less of a battery hog on MacBooks. The company said version 110, rolling out to all users this week, will offer a performance boost on both new Macs with Apple processors and even older models.
The test conducted by Google showed that users can watch 18 hours of YouTube videos or surf the web for 17 hours on the new M2-powered Macbook Pro running macOS Ventura with the new version. Google has not provided data indicating how much of a difference the new version would make on older Macbook models with Intel chipsets.
Notably, Google started testing memory and power saving modes last year. But these improvements started reaching users last week. The search giant said the power saving mode could improve battery life even more, as Chrome could run for 30 minutes longer than in the aforementioned tests.
Google noted that the Chrome team has made changes to iframes (an element that loads an HTML page within a page). It also kept the browser from redrawing UI elements unnecessarily, and tuned the timer for more efficient CPU access.
Last year, Microsoft also tuned its Edge browser to take up less system resources for better power management.
You can check which version of Google Chrome you’re using and (possibly) update to the latest version by clicking the “More” button in the top-right corner and opening the “Help” menu, then clicking “About Google Chrome.” Otherwise, Google will automatically download new updates in the background every now and then.