Boy, the collaboration did not take long to materialize! Microsoft jumping onto the Chromium bandwagon for its Edge web browser has already resulted in a number of positives for the two worlds.
Not only is the Microsoft browser now growing leaps and bounds, Google is also taking the good work the Redmond based company is doing for the Chromium project. In other words, any improvements that Microsoft cooks up can be applied by any browser based on that engine.
Including Google Chrome.
Well, anyway, the latest on the matter is that Microsoft is applying its expertise in battery management on the regular flavor of Edge to this new variant.
This Chromium Gerrit entry posted by Microsoft goes over the possibility of reducing battery drain by preventing media content from being cached to the disk on a PC. In simpler terms, this results in the disk being active, and also the OS is prevented from entering low powered modes.
It’s remarkable how the original engineers missed it.
According to the local tests that Microsoft ran on unencrypted 1080p media five times for 5 minutes on a laptop with the implementation turned on and off. And it found that disk write activity decreased by a good 309KB/sec when it was turned on.
Anyway, the long and short of it is that Google has already added a flag to the latest Chrome Canary build that implements this very fix.
The new flag is called “Turn off caching of streaming media to disk”, and is available for other platforms besides Windows, including macOS, Linux, Chrome OS and Android. As a Google engineer explains, this change will improve device battery life for users.
Always a good feeling when this happens!
