One great advantage of the web browser Safari has over most of the competition – using it as your browser can have a significant positive impact in terms of battery life on portable Macs. To try to get more Mac users, Google is hoping to close that gap with upcoming changes to Chrome. Per senior Chrome engineer Peter Kasting outlining future steps on Google+, we’re going to see changes to the way Chrome handles rendering of background tabs, and eking out some minor but crucial gains in the CPU efficiency of searching with Google.
There’s a lot more going on, most of which is designed to help Chrome match or approach CPU efficiency found in Safari. Kasting even goes so far as to say the Chrome team has “no intention of sitting idly by (pun intended) when our users are suffering.” Groaning about Chrome’s efficiency cost in the Mac power user realm is common, but it’s interesting to see Google so on the nose about the issue. This is coming to the Chrome beta channel in a little over a month, which means general release probably a few months down the road.
(Thank you to TechCrunch for the info!)