New version of Chrome is much easier on your laptop’s battery

If there’s one complaint about Chrome that keeps popping up lately, it’s that Google’s web browser — once a lightweight alternative to the much slower Internet Explorer and Firefox — is a resources hog.

Now, Google has partly addressed that issue by throttling background tabs so that they don’t use a lot of CPU time, thus saving power.

According to a post on Google’s Chromium blog, the change, which went live with Chrome version 57, makes background tabs 25% less busy. This, in turn, should have a considerable impact on a laptop’s battery life, though Google doesn’t state exactly how big.