A Forbes associate that goes by the name of Ian Morris has discovered a rather interesting bug that affects the popular Google Chrome web browser. If you do not use this browser or you use it on a desktop computer everything will be fine for you, but if you use Chrome on a notebook on battery power then the browser may considerably shorten your battery life.
The bug found is related to misuse of the system clock tick rate. In case you are not familiar with it, we will explain it to you – when a PC processor is idle it shuts itself down to save power but it still checks every once in a while if some CPU time is needed here and there. Well, the system clock tick rate commands how often your PC processor wakes up. When you use Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox the tick rate is automatically set to 15.625 ms while if you use Google Chrome the tick rate is set at 1.000 ms. This means that with Chrome the chip will be awakened 1000 times a second while with any other web browser this will happen just 64 times a second. Quite naturally Chrome needs more power to operate properly when compared to other web browsers.
Tests conducted by Mr. Morris show that with Chrome closed the power consumption of his laptop goes down by 12-15 watts. While this may not seem much, these power savings may increase your notebook battery life by as much as 25 per cent.
Google is aware of the issue, which was first observed back in 2010 and is now working on a fix. Unfortunately until then you should use a different web browser especially if you run it on a notebook.
Source: Forbes.com