Chrome Experimental Feature Will Throttle Javascript-Timer Wakeups on Backgrounded Tabs

Slashdot reader techtsp writes: Starting with October's release of Chrome 86, the web browser will offer a way to limit JavaScript timer wake ups in background web pages to one wake up per minute, restricting the execution of certain background tasks — for example, checking if the scroll position changed, reporting logs, and analyzing interactions with ads. Google plans to achieve this courtesy of a new experimental feature called "Throttle Javascript timers in background."

Google recently experimented with a prototype that limits Javascript timer wake ups to one per minute. In this experiment, Google opened 36 random tabs in the background while the foreground tab was about:blank. At the end of the experiment, Google found that throttling Javascript timers extends the battery life by almost 2 hours (28 percent) for a user with up to 36 background tabs, and when the foreground tab is about:blank...

Chrome will provide developers with a message in the DevTools console when a Javascript timer is delayed by more than 5 seconds.

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