Chrome 57 update will save your laptop's battery life. Here's how.

Impact

Battery life can be deal breaker or a deal maker. Now Google Chrome — the most popular internet browser — preserves your computer's battery life with the new Chrome 57 update.

Chrome version 57, according to Google's Chromium blog, will delay timers so that average CPU loads are limited. This results in "25% fewer busy background tabs" and will significantly impact a laptop's battery life. That said, tabs playing audio or using real-time connections — like WebSockets or WebRTC — will not be affected.

Mark Lennihan/AP

"Starting in version 57, Chrome will throttle individual background tabs by limiting the timer fire rate for background tabs using excessive power," Google said in a blog post.

While this is a remedy to a common user complaint, Google said it's still working on fully suspending background tabs.

"In the long term, the ideal is for background tabs to be fully suspended and instead rely on new APIs for service workers to do work in the background," the company wrote. "Chrome will continue to take steps in this direction to prolong users' battery life, while still enabling all the same experiences developers can build today."