Chromebooks are finally getting a battery saver mode for those long work days

For more years than I can remember at this point, the major operating systems (Windows, specifically) have all had a setting that allowed users to tone things down on their device when not near a charger. There are different takes on this strategy, but the end result is largely the same: when the user chooses, they can sacrifice a little performance and/or creature comforts to gain back some battery life.

Now, I’m not saying this has been perfectly implemented all of those years, and Windows for sure made a mess of it in the earlier days; but having some control over how your device chooses to save battery life when you are out and about is something every user can appreciate.

Those earlier Windows days made it a bit of a chore to manage, but they’ve cleaned things up and made the settings pretty simple for users who would like to give up a bit of speed, screen brightness, etc. for the sake of keeping that battery filled throughout the day.

Chrome’s Energy Saver confusion

Thus far, however, ChromeOS has not had this sort of feature in place and we’ve been asking for it for quite some time. Going back to 2020 and the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook, we advocated that a simple governor on the processor, a more-aggressive auto screen brightness, and some background process limits could have helped that device’s atrocious battery. Though our tests haven’t shown it to be that bad, there are fears around the HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook’s battery life that could be assuaged by a battery saver feature, too.

But you might be asking yourself: “Doesn’t Chrome already have a battery saver feature?” And you’d be somewhat correct to mistake this coming-soon feature we’re discussing today for that new-ish feature that was added back at the end of 2022, but they aren’t the same thing. The Chrome Energy Saver feature is for the browser only, and it works across the board on ChromeOS (with a flag at this point), Linux, Windows and MacOS.

Running low on battery and don’t have a laptop charger nearby? When you’re browsing the Web with Chrome and your device battery level reaches 20%, Chrome will save battery by limiting background activity and visual effects for websites with animations and videos.

via The Keyword

This is helpful, sure, but it should not be confused for OS-level power saving options. While Chrome’s Energy Saver feature will surely help Chromebook users save a bit of battery, it won’t do anything for those not in a browser window at the time. With ChromeOS’ expanding array of non-Chrome tasks that can be done, this still leaves us needing a proper Battery Saver option for the OS as a whole. And it looks to finally be on the way.

ChromeOS Battery Saver

As you can see from these very-new commits, a change is coming that will allow Chromebook users to enable some sort of Battery Saver mode in the future. What that mode will do and what it will be capable of are still very much up in the air. Making matters a tad more confusing is the fact that the existing Chrome Energy Saver is referred to as Batter Saver in the Chromium Repositories, so digging up clues is a bit tougher than other features we keep an eye on. Still, details should emerge soon.

I’m hopeful that this feature will include things like background process limitations, a more-aggressive approach to auto adjusting screen brightness, and most importantly, some sort of throttling for the CPU on devices that need it. At the end of the day, many of these 12th-gen Chromebooks don’t need to be running wide open all the time, and limiting the processing power a bit could help users squeeze a lot more life out of the battery available.

And before anyone mentions it, yes, I called out AMD for doing this on their handful of Ryzen 3000 Chromebooks, but that wasn’t presented to the user as an option: it was a forced throttle to save battery life. There are going to be plenty of users who are only off the charger for small amounts of time and have no interest in throttling things for the sake of battery life. Changes like this upcoming Battery Saver only work if they are optional – not forced on users.

From the language in the commits above, it seems clear that this will be an optional feature for users, and one that could come in very handy. No different than the limitations of Android’s Battery Saver feature, it will be nice to be able to purposefully limit the system on any Chromebook when I know I’ll need a lot more battery life. Perhaps an option to auto-enable it would be nice, too, as long as it can be turned off when I need that extra bit of power. We’ll be keeping a close eye on this one and as soon as it hits the Canary Channel of ChromeOS, we’ll give it a spin.