Chrome’s upcoming high-efficiency and battery saver mode will have visual indicators

We have been discussing and following the development of a few Chrome and ChromeOS features to improve battery and performance. We have been documenting all that here based on the diligent work that u/Leopeva64-2 on Reddit has done. Just a couple of weeks ago, we reported on the introduction of a new “Performance” page, which will have toggles to turn on “High-Efficiency Mode” and “Battery Saver Mode.” 

As stated then, “High-Efficiency mode,” or “Snooze tabs,” will discard tabs after they have been in the background for a specified time, while “Battery Saver mode” will throttle the frame rate to lower power consumption. At the time, we mentioned how there were no obvious toggles or a UI to control when either of these modes were turned on, except for navigating to the chrome://discards page.

However, according to u/Leopeva64-2’s latest findings, both “Battery Saver” and “Snooze Tabs” have received visual indicators. Battery saver, for example, will have its own Chrome toolbar indicator when engaged, which will also serve as a toggle to turn it off and on.

“High efficiency mode,” which was the original name for “Snooze tabs,” which could yet again be renamed to “Memory Saver,” will also have an indicator. This indicator will be a “page action chip,” which will appear momentarily in the address bar when reloading a tab that has been previously “snoozed,” letting you know that the tab has been brought back. This same indicator will pop up an option to turn the feature off altogether.

Of course, none of these features are available in the Stable channel yet and are instead only available through a flag in Canary. This means that both of them still have a ways to go before they are ready for prime time, particularly when we are talking about features that disable other features which are important to the Chrome user experience, such as smooth scrolling and being able to bring back tabs that the system sheds. We will continue to follow updates on this front and report them here as the features get fleshed out and ready for everyone to use safely.