How To Enable Power Saving Mode in Chrome

Ever notice Chrome sucking your laptop’s battery down faster than it should? Yeah, that can be pretty annoying, especially when you’re trying to squeeze more hours out of a long day. Luckily, Chrome has this energy-saving mode built-in from version 110 onward — kind of weird that it’s not obvious, but hey, better late than never. Essentially, it kicks in and limits some features like lowering video frame rates, cutting down on smooth scrolling, and turning off background processes. All this helps extend battery life without totally killing your browsing experience.

The catch is, it works best when you enable it early, like before your battery hits 20%.Because of course, Chrome has to make it a little complicated just to turn on a simple battery saver. On some setups, you might find that toggling it doesn’t seem to do much at first, so try rebooting Chrome or even your whole machine — sometimes these settings take a second to really stick.

How to Activate Chrome’s Power Mode

Before jumping in, double-check that your Chrome is up to date to at least version 110, or newer. You can do that by clicking Help > About Google Chrome and seeing if there’s an update waiting. Once you’re sure it’s all fresh:

Enable Energy Saving Mode in Chrome

• Type chrome://settings in the address bar or click the three-dot menu in the top right corner, then go to Settings.
• Scroll down and find the Performance section. If it’s not there, your Chrome might be too old or this feature isn’t available yet; no harm in checking again after an update.
• Click on Energy Saving and toggle it on. You can usually set it to activate automatically when your battery drops below a certain level — usually 20%, but if you see options for that, set it as you prefer.

Main thing to keep in mind: this mode isn’t just a toggle, it’s about balancing performance vs.battery life. On some machines, enabling it might noticeably slow down video playback or make some web games less smooth, but hey, that’s the trade-off. My experience has been that on a few laptops, it either works instantly or takes a few seconds to activate fully, so don’t worry if it’s not super responsive the first time.

Memory Saver Mode — What’s that about?

If you’re running multiple tabs and notice Chrome gets sluggish or drains the battery fast, this feature might help. The Memory Saver mode cuts off inactive tabs from consuming CPU or RAM, which is kind of a lifesaver when you want your main tabs to perform well without Chrome just hogging all your resources.

This is also found inside Performance under chrome://settings/performance — or maybe you’ll see it directly in the main settings menu. You can add websites to an exception list, so they stay active even if you turn the mode on, which is useful if you need a tab to stay loaded while browsing or working.

Be aware, though: turning on Memory Saver can sometimes cause sites like Gmail or streaming services to reload or freeze a bit when you switch back. Weirdly enough, on some setups it works perfectly, and on others, it’s more hit and miss. Just play around with it a bit, and see what gives you the best balance.

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