I think I won't be mistaken if I assume that you, like me, use Google Chrome. This browser is distinguished by a high level of usability, logical layout of the interface and support for extensions that allow you to add missing functions to it. However, that doesn't mean Chrome is perfect. On the contrary, it is hyper-wasteful and can consume all the RAM in a matter of minutes, load the processor harder than any Photoshop and discharge your laptop before any other browser does. Therefore, it is logical that at some point Google began to promise to fix everything. But to promise is not to do.
Google has long promised to increase the autonomy of laptops when working with Chrome
I have been watching Chrome updates for quite some time, and therefore I could not help but notice that several times a year Google consistently promises to release an update that will lower the power consumption of the browser. But, as it turned out, such promises were made even before I began to notice them. Looking ahead, I will say that not all of them were implemented. Perhaps one innovation was replaced by another, or perhaps the efficiency of mechanisms designed to reduce the power consumption of Chrome was not high enough. But one way or another, Google continues to make promises to this day.
Chrome is draining the battery
Google especially loves to improve the background work of tabs.
June 2014: Google said it was fixing an unpleasant feature in Chrome that caused the browser to wake up the processor even when idle. Fixing it was supposed to cut Chrome's power consumption by 25%.
June 2015: Google engineer Peter Casting announced on his Google+ page that Chrome developers are planning to make the browser prioritize open tabs, pessimizing background tabs. The Chrome team does not intend to sit back while our users suffer, Casting summed up.
September 2015: A few months before Flash was completely phased out, Google developers built a special mechanism into Chrome to disable Flash. Activating the blocker increased battery life by up to 15%, they said.
May 2016: Google started blocking all Flash content in Chrome. According to company representatives, this should have led to “significant savings in browser power consumption.”
September 2016: Google responded to a video Microsoft in which Edge bypassed Chrome in terms of energy efficiency, and said that a similar upgrade is waiting for its own browser.
March 2017: Google announced that Chrome 57 will restrict background tabs that consume too many resources. Thus, it was planned to increase the battery life when working in Chrome.
How to extend your Chrome runtime
Night theme is the best way to save battery life
November 2018: Google conducted research and found that the colors displayed on the screen can affect power consumption. Therefore, it was decided to implement a night theme in the browser in order to increase the number of dark shades, which save more resources.
August 2019: Engineers Microsoft who migrated Edge to Chromium came up with a way to disable streaming media caching. Google liked the idea, and it promised to implement it on its own.
December 2019: Google said it is working on a freezing mechanism for tabs in Chrome that will pause tabs to conserve battery life.
May 2020: Google announced that it intends to save the resource that Chrome consumes with a built-in ad blocker that will monitor banner weights and block them if necessary.
July 2020: Google has acknowledged that it intends to embed a dedicated JavaScript timer in Chrome that will only allow background tabs to refresh once a minute.
As you can see, a lot of promises have been made over the past 6 years. I don’t want to accuse Google of lying, because some of what was promised to us, the company's developers really brought to life. Another thing is that some of the announced changes were never implemented, and some, although they were, did not achieve the declared results. In addition, it is very curious how much attention Google pays to background tabs, constantly improving them, but still does not offer final tests and comparisons that would show that there really was a lot of good from all its manipulations.