Photographed by Anna-Alexia Basile.Many of us love to use Chrome, but don't love how much battery and energy the browser sucks up. (My computer should not be crawling just because I've got 10 tabs open.) If you're in the same boat, there is a quick fix that can help you out.
By doing a little tab triage, you can slash how much energy Chrome is using so that your laptop gets better battery life.
If you're on a Mac, head to the Activity Monitor and you can check and see just how resource-heavy Chrome is. (The easiest way to access Activity Monitor is through Spotlight Search: Hit command and spacebar at the same time and then start typing Activity Monitor.) Most apps will hover somewhere between 0 and 50 on Energy Impact under the Energy tab. If Chrome is higher than that — especially if it's over 100 — it's time to make some tweaks.
Now, head to the settings button in Chrome (the three bars on the right of the URL field), head down to More Tools and select Task Manager. This gives you a tab-by-tab breakdown of which pages are sucking the most life out of your laptop battery. Kill the ones that are the biggest offenders. Boom, you can still happily swap between five or 10 or 20 of your favorite tabs, but with a far lower impact on your computer's energy usage — just check Activity Monitor again for the concrete results.
On Medium, developer Primož Cigler found that by doing this, he doubled his 1.5 year old laptop's battery life.
You don't necessarily need to do this trick all the time, but if you don't want to change your workflow and do want to maximize your notebook's battery life, it's a good trick to know.
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