Google says Chrome won’t drain your MacBook battery as much

Google said that it is rolling out under-the-hood improvements to the latest version of Chrome that makes it less of a battery hog on MacBooks. The company said that version 110, which is rolling out to all users this week, will provide 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 browse the web for 17 hours on the new M2-powered Macbook Pro running macOS Ventura with the new version. Google didn’t provide any data indicating how much difference the new version would make on older Macbook models with Intel chipsets.

Notably, Google started testing memory and energy saver modes last year. But these enhancements started reaching users beginning last week. The search giant said that the energy saver mode could improve battery life even more as Chrome could run for 30 minutes longer than in the above-mentioned tests.

Google noted that the Chrome team made changes to iframes (an element that loads an HTML page within a page). It also stopped the browser from redrawing UI elements unnecessarily, and tuned its timer for more efficient CPU access.

Last year, Microsoft also tuned its Edge browser to take up fewer system resources for better energy management.

You can check the version of Google Chrome you are using and (potentially) update to the latest version by clicking on the ‘More’ button in the top right corner and opening the ‘Help’ menu and then clicking on ‘About Google Chrome’. Otherwise, Google automatically downloads and applies new updates in the background every now and then.