Microsoft after moving to Chromium started working on improving device battery life. Based on their initial test results, disabling media caching to disk causes less disk activity during the media playback, by keeping the disk less active power consumption will also be decreased, which automatically results in power savings.
MS knows how to improve battery life as they claimed with their tests in the past their Classic Edge lasts longer than Chrome and Firefox browsers. The company has already contributed a lot to Chromium and still doing that. To the latest, Edge team is actively involved in making device consume less battery feature.
Microsoft’ Shawn Picket came up with a proposal to “prevent steaming media content form being cached to disk where possible”. Shawn Picket in the bug created for the feature says when streaming media played in browser “media content is added to general HTTP cache during acquisition and playback. This has a negative impact on battery life as keeping the disk active increases power consumption in general”.
Shawn has a implemented the change that will “prevent caching of certain media content to disk for the purpose of improving batter life for users” and it has been landed in Chrome Canary and available behind a flag named “Turn off caching of streaming media to disk”.
What you’ve to do to test the feature is visit chrome://flags in Canary, search for it and enable it.
Turn off streaming media caching experimental feature available for Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, and Android, when enabled, supposed to ” reduce disk activity during media playback, which can result in Power savings.”.
Unfortunately, Chrome Canary as of writing article on 78.0.3885.0 isn’t loading any web pages, Chrome internal pages including flags load just fine. Expect this to be addressed with the update that arrives on tomorrow.
Related articles:
Avast Secure browser new version promises to save memory and extend Battery life
Opera 38 final now available with Battery Saver feature
