Chrome has always been a power-hungry monster, and over the years Google has made many changes to reduce the strain on the system, including an Energy Saver mode. However, changes to the Canary build of Chrome suggest the possibility of a major Energy Saver upgrade.

The Canary build of Chrome is an experimental version of the browser, and Google tests new features and updates long before they appear in stable or beta versions of the official Chrome browser. But it is also a good indicator of what Google wants Chrome to do and what upgrades will be available in the coming months.

Leopeva64, a contributor to X, has discovered flags associated with many of these potential upgrades, allowing Chrome's energy saving mode behavior to be customized a bit more. Specifically, it can "freeze CPU-intensive background tabs" while this mode is turned on. An additional flag also allows you to test this feature by forcing all tabs to behave like CPU-intensive tabs.

Leopeva64 has also found settings in the past that allow one to set how aggressive the energy saving mode is. According to the menu text, these settings are related to the time it takes for a tab to become inactive. The more aggressive the energy saving, the less time it takes to essentially shut down the tab and force the user to reload it from scratch.

These are both fairly useful features in browsers like Chrome. The problem with browsers is that each individual tab is essentially its own window, and as long as it remains active, it will continue to eat up RAM, consume power, and consume resources. Therefore, by allowing users to tell Chrome when to put tabs to sleep, we have given users some control over how Chrome handles tabs. They will be able to choose between efficiency and having all tabs resume as soon as possible.

Similarly, identifying which tabs are consuming the most resources and actively avoiding opening tabs unless absolutely necessary should reduce power consumption significantly. Because why consume resources when they are not actually being used?

Canary is not designed for the majority of people, but if you want to check out these features yourself, you can download and use them. The rest of us will have to wait until these features are included in the official version of Chrome. That is, if they ever do.