A new throttling policy has been implemented to make the Chrome tabs less juicy when running in the background. These tabs are responsible for around one-third of the computer’s power consumption.
The Page Visibility API is used to know if a Chrome tab is in the background or not. For resource-consuming background tabs, Chrome now makes sure only 1% of a CPU core is put to work. However, this throttling won’t be done in the case of background tabs running audio and video or having WebRTC and WebSockets connections.
