Love it or hate it, whatever you may have to say about it, Google Chrome is one of the top browsers in the world, and head and shoulders above all the others in Google integration. If your entire digital life is synced to your Gmail address, there’s practically no question that Chrome is the browser you want. What is questionable, however, is the battery life Chrome offers to laptop, phone, and tablet users. The number of people out there who work and play from laptops, smartphones, and tablets running Windows , Android and Linux is incredible, and this crowd, for the most part, values the ability to take their workhorse or gaming powerhouse with them where they like and use it as long as they like. While a number of devices miss the magical 8-hour workday mark, every bit of juice counts, and Chrome has been the subject of continual scorn in this regard. Thus, Google took to YouTube, or rather to Vimeo, to set the record straight on video.
While some other laptops can pulverize it in battery life, gaming chops or screen beauty, the Microsoft Surface Book is widely thought of as the current gold standard for Windows laptops, akin to the Chromebook Pixel for Chrome OS devices. Google grabbed a pair of these, both running an identical Windows 10 setup, and installed two different versions of Chrome for the test at hand. One had Chrome version 46, from 2015. The other had the current version, Chrome 53. The two laptops started playing the same video loop from streaming website Vimeo. In the time lapse that followed, the laptop with Chrome 46 doing the job petered out at 8 hours and 26 minutes, a respectable work day for most professionals and more than long enough for most casual browsers. Chrome 53 took things a bit further and pulled down a whopping 10 hours and 39 minutes.
In a blog post on the matter, Google noted that in the same time frame, Chrome has become about 15 percent faster. The latest release of Chrome has also become 33 percent faster on Apple’s Mac platform year on year, and the Android version adds in support for Android Pay, making it one of the more versatile browsers on the platform. Users of 32-bit Linux distributions will sadly not see any of these improvements, but just about every other platform can bask in a faster Chrome that offers better battery life than ever before.