Google promises to tackle years-old battery-draining bug in Chrome

Google has for years left a bug in its Chrome browser that significantly reduces the battery life of laptops on Windows, but the company promises to tackle the problem now. The problem lies in adjusting the system clock tick rate.

The problem was already raised in 2012 and concerns the frequency of the system clock. By default, Windows has a tick rate of 15.625 milliseconds, and the processor is woken up 64 times per second, so that it is ready for computational tasks. Programs can increase the tick rate. “Some applications adjust it to 1ms, which can reduce battery time on a mobile system by as much as 25 percent. Such a dramatic decrease in battery time is not desirable,” warns Microsoft.

Adjusting to 1ms is exactly what Chrome does and initially it seemed that the browser only did this on sites with Adobe Flash content, but users complained that Chrome shortens the interval to 1000 times per second in many other cases as well. The bug can be made visible with the ClockRes program. The problem is that the browser sets this value immediately upon opening and doesn’t change it anymore. Other browsers also adjust the tick rate to 1ms for some browsing activities, but with Internet Explorer and Firefox, for example, the system clock tick rate reverts to 15.625 milliseconds once the activity ends or the user closes the tab.

Chrome users should close the entire browser, noted a Forbes journalist, who rekindled the problem after years. Due to the renewed attention, the bug has been given Priority 1 in Chromium development, and Google tells PCWorld that it is addressing the issue. Incidentally, the Chrome developers already fixed a similar flaw in 2008.