Google Chrome on Android will stop background tabs after 5 minutes to improve performance

What once was dominated by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google Chrome has done a great job at dominating the overall web browser market. Various reports project Chrome’s usage numbers between 50% to just over 62%, and this has actually been both a blessing and a curse. Google has been under the investigation from both Russia and Europe for their actions and their practices just may have to change in the near future. Still, even with the popularity of the Chrome browser, users have a number of complaints. Google engineers have been working on improving these lately and Chrome for Android will soon stop background tabs after 5 minutes of inactivity.

We originally found a commit in the Chromium Gerrit that showed the team was working on improving the performance of Google Chrome on Android. This was a feature that was originally meant to be enabled by default, but that never happened. If the user doesn’t know about it then they won’t know it’s there to be enabled. Then, another commit was discovered that mentioned this StopLoadingInBackground flag again, but this time the comment said that the feature would be on by default. Now, Google is aware that people listen to music and watch videos in PiP mode with Chrome, so naturally, this playback is exempt from the intervention.

The summary of this new feature has been outlined here, but the gist of it is that Google Chrome of Android is trying to save your SoC performance cycles (which will also save you some battery life in the long run). The loading of tasks and fetching of resources of a Google Chrome tab will be stopped when the renderer has been in the background for more than 5 minutes. The folks at Google have been running a Finch experiment over the last 5 months and believe they have ironed out all of the issues they were able to discover. Metrics of their tests show reduced CPU work in the background (which again, saves the device battery life) and it also showed much improved foreground FCP when there are 2+tabs loading.

For those who are interested in the more technical details of this experiment, Google has published their design document here.

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