The experimental feature which Microsoft readied to improve device battery life during media playback in Chrome browser, now landed in Microsoft Edge Canary and available for testing.
Microsoft which claims better battery life with EdgeHTML when compared to rival browsers has implemented a change in Chromium that “prevent(s) streaming media content from being cached to disk where possible”.
MS has found they can make the device to consume less power by turning off media caching to disk in Chromium browser. The company has test results to back this up which yields to power savings. You may want to check Media Cache Reduction explainer on this page for more technical details.
The explainer page mentioned above notes in the open issues that this change “could potentially reduce the amount of media available for immediate playback” when a user having slow network connection starts streaming media playback and lefts the device to allow for a certain period time for the content to download.
To test the feature right away
1. Launch latest Microsoft Edge Canary 78.0.256.0 or later
2. Visit edge://flags page., search for “caching”, in the highlighted results, for “Turn off caching of streaming media to disk”, choose “Enabled” and restart the browser.
Do note the feature is still being tested, there is no guarantee this will get into stable versions of Edge and Chrome browsers.
