Remember the time when Internet Explorer had the biggest browser market share? Yeah, us neither. Google Chrome is dominating the market, but it has never been known for its efficient power usage.

Luckily, this is being addressed though, with the official Chromium blog noting that, starting in version 57, Chrome will throttle individual background tabs. It will do so by limiting the timer fire rate for background tabs consuming too much power. However, background tabs playing audio will not be affected.

If you’re like us, closing tabs is a pain, and having a number of them open in the background is par for the course. This enhancement to the Chrome Browser is thus good news, with Alexander Timin, software engineer over at Google stating that the throttling mechanism leads to 25% fewer busy background tabs. He notes that going forward, the plan is for background tabs to be fully suspended, leading to an even larger increase in power saving.

If you want to test this out for yourself, Version 57 of Chrome has already started to roll out.

To see if you have the latest version installed, click on the three little dots in the upper right hand corner of Chrome and then “Settings” > “About”. You can also update from there.