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For all of Chrome’s benefits, it has one major drawback: It eats up your computer’s resources like an invasive species of fish commandeering a lake. Today, though, Google announced one change that’s going to make a major difference, both for your battery life and your browsing sanity.
Detailed on Google’s Chrome blog, the update involves dampening Adobe Flash’s substantial impact on your PC’s longevity. Starting today in Chrome’s latest Beta release, and “soon” on desktops otherwise, the browser will “intelligently pause” Flash-based content that isn’t part of any given website’s core experience. If the feature accidentally pauses something you’re interested in, it’ll start playing with one click.
Why will this be so helpful? While Flash is often deployed for running videos and animations, it crunches your CPU like few other applications, straining your system and running your battery down along with it. The performance degradation has in the past been so extreme that Apple very publicly (and harshly) disallowed Flash on iOS.
That spat was five years ago; Flash has obviously improved since then, but it’s also increasingly less vital. Just this past January, Google switched over from Flash to HTML5 for YouTube, a trend that’s been reflected across the industry at large.
But Flash still pops up plenty throughout Chrome, in videos and animations that haunt many of the sites you visit on a regular basis, slurping up your juice tab after tab. Chrome is already rougher on your battery than Internet Explorer on Windows or Safari on Mac. Flash doesn’t account for all of that disparity, but it certainly doesn’t help.
Chrome’s new feature contains a tidy ancillary benefit as well. Yes, intelligent pausing of videos and animations you didn’t want to watch anyway will gift you more time between hunting down outlets. Equally important, though, is the kind of videos and animations that Chrome will now be blocking. Content that’s not “central to the webpage,” as Li puts it, almost certainly means auto-play video advertisements and other pop-ups. Now, instead of having to click them into oblivion, they simply won’t play to begin with. That doesn’t mean you’ll be saved from all video ads forever; the entire industry will switch over the HTML5 eventually, at which point you’re back stuck with the same lameness as now. But at least you won’t be putting your PC on life support in the process.
Better still, the feature is turned on by default; you won’t have to know how to dig around your settings to reap the benefits. That ease of use is especially important because, as Gizmodo points out, Chrome extensions like Flash Control have given users similar control over Adobe-related activity for some time, and power users have known when and where to find them. It’s been equally long, though, since Chrome was a niche browser; it’s second only to Internet Explorer in marketshare, with over a quarter of the browsing public choosing Google’s offering. Many of these people don’t necessarily know what a Chrome extension is, or even what Flash might be and how it’s affecting their system. Nor should they have to.
You can download the Chrome Beta here if you’re feeling adventurous, or just wait patiently for the day your computer doesn’t gasp for air quite as quickly as it used to, and the auto play ads don’t invade your screen quite as often, all without a single click from you.
