How to Reduce the Battery Drain Caused by Your Web Browser
NEWS | 18 May 2025
When you're using your laptop away from its charging cable, every bit of battery life matters—it can make the difference between just managing to finish that important email or essay, or not. One of the ways you can make sure you eke out as much time between charges as possible is to look at your browser settings. The web browser is most probably where you're going to spend most of your computing time, so any battery life savings you can make here will quickly add up. There are a number of tricks to try to reduce the energy demands from loading up all those web pages, videos, social media feeds, and web apps. Applying just one or two of these tricks—together with some more general battery-saving tips—can give you a significant boost in battery life and make sure you get to the end of the working day without needing a recharge. Google Chrome You can enable Energy Saver in Chrome's settings. Courtesy of David Nield Google Chrome comes with a dedicated Energy Saver setting, which turns off some background tasks to reduce the load on your laptop. Browsing might be slightly slower in some circumstances, but there's a positive trade-off in battery life. Click the three dots in the top-right corner of any Chrome tab, then choose Settings > Performance. You can toggle the Energy Saver feature on and off from this screen. You can also instruct Chrome to turn it on automatically, either whenever your laptop is unplugged or whenever your laptop's battery life drops below 20 percent. There's another toggle switch here: Memory Saver. Enabling this reduces the memory load of inactive tabs until you switch back to them. While it's not as directly related to battery life as Energy Saver, it can also reduce the demands of Chrome on your system. Microsoft Edge You have two levels of Efficiency Mode to choose between. Courtesy of David Nield Microsoft Edge has something similar to Chrome's Energy Saver in the form of Efficiency Mode. Its primary function is to snooze inactive tabs that you've haven't visited in a while, which then means Edge is hogging fewer system resources, and from there drawing less energy from the battery.
Author: Matthew Korfhage. David Nield. Justin Pot. Brenda Stolyar. Verity Burns. Lily Hay Newman. Simon Hill. Scott Gilbertson. Louryn Strampe. Julian Chokkattu.
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