Chrome has always been held up as an example of software being battery hungry. Below you’ll see a video that the folks at Google put together to show off the battery life improvement and you might notice that they chose to use Microsoft’s Surface Book as their test subject.
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Google’s Chrome browser is often criticised for its impact on mobile device battery life.
Specifically, Chrome for Mac now uses 33% last power when viewing images, scrolling the page, and watching video. Google has also used Surface Books in the new comparison video to show that its latest browser version is much improved than a year ago.
“We’ve been improving battery life across the board, tracking progress using power measurement tools”, the firm explains.
“When measured with tools like Speedometer, improvements over the previous year have made Chrome more than 15% faster on both desktop and Android”.
Google updated its browser for Windows with Material Design and battery improvements over the weekend. In the video example, embedded below, you can see identical Microsoft Surface Book computers playing Vimeo videos – the newest version of Chrome provides 2hr 12m more watch time on a single charge.
But it has promised battery and performance updates aplenty. With a focus on video playback, it isn’t certain if we will see similar improvements when browsing regular websites on Windows.
Microsoft’s Personal Shopping Assistant is built by Microsoft Garage, the company’s unit that developed several experimental projects that ended up available for download for all users thanks to their pretty helpful features, as is the case of several Android and iOS apps.
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As of August 30th though, those requests for more advanced authentication may be delivered upon, as a recent commit to the source code on the Chromium project indicates that fingerprint readers are coming to Chromium and by association, Chrome OS. They have been doing tests over tests in order to get some precise data and they proved what many users already suspected: Chrome really drains a laptop battery.
