Thanks to the open-source nature of Chromium, Microsoft has had its first major and positive impact on Chrome, Google’s web browser. Thanks to a feature request from Microsoft, Google will issue a change to Chromium, the open-source project by which Google makes Chrome, that significantly improves battery life.
“Today, media content is cached to disk during acquisition and playback,” Microsoft’s Shawn Pickett explains in his change suggestion for Chromium. “Keeping the disk active during this process increases power consumption in general, and [it] can also prevent certain lower-power modes from being engaged in the operating system. Since media consumption is a high-usage scenario, this extra power usage has a negative impact on battery life. This change will prevent the caching of certain media content to disk for the purpose of improving device battery life for users.”
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And Microsoft knows battery life. Aside from being the makers of the most popular desktop operating system on which Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers are run, it also spent several years optimizing battery life in its previous versions of Microsoft Edge. And then it would publicize the results, in which classic Edge routinely outperformed the battery life in Chrome and other browsers.
And Google’s on board. For now, the change is being tested as an experimental feature in Chrome Canary—the nightly builds of Chrome 78—which needs to be enabled by default: Just open chrome://flags and search for “Turn off caching of streaming media to disk.” (This works in Chrome for Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, and Android.)
And if all goes as well as expected, it will be implemented and enabled by default in the browser.
skane2600
<p>This appears to be a feature agreement between the two companies. It doesn't really have anything to do with open source since Google is the one making the change.</p>
skane2600
<blockquote><em><a href="#450037">In reply to paul-thurrott:</a></em></blockquote><p>There's really little difference between MS agreeing to make Chrome as their default browser vs making a new browser based on Chrome code. The conventional wisdom would be that Microsoft would never do either one, but here we are.</p>
skane2600
<blockquote><em><a href="#450039">In reply to jrickel96:</a></em></blockquote><p>Nothing in the story here indicates that MIcrosoft made the change. </p>
skane2600
<blockquote><em><a href="#450062">In reply to DataMeister:</a></em></blockquote><p>"Thanks to a <em>feature request</em> from Microsoft, <em>Google </em>will issue a change to Chromium"</p><p><br></p><p>Please quote the part of the story that says Microsoft made code changes. Submitting code to an open source project isn't a feature request. </p>
chocolate starfish
<blockquote><em><a href="#450035">In reply to Pbike908:</a></em></blockquote><p>The Chrome extension AutoplayStopper will do the job for now.</p>
antrenorul
<blockquote><em><a href="#450093">In reply to truerock2:</a></em></blockquote><p>If only there was a flag that you could use to toggle the feature off… Oh, wait…</p>
skane2600
<blockquote><em><a href="#450164">In reply to sevenacids:</a></em></blockquote><p>It's always going to be a tradeoff. When RAM was rare, media content was a lot smaller. They both grew.</p>
skane2600
<blockquote><em><a href="#450163">In reply to truerock2:</a></em></blockquote><p>Microsoft's biggest blunders are based on paranoia (e.g. Java will replace Windows, Netscape will replace Windows etc.)</p>
ArvindV
<blockquote><em><a href="#450163">In reply to truerock2:</a></em></blockquote><p>Winning at all cost is the definition of evil</p>
chocolate starfish
<blockquote><em><a href="#450172">In reply to ArvindV:</a></em></blockquote><p>Nope, it's the definition of Capitalism.</p>
dontbeevil
<blockquote><em><a href="#450219">In reply to paul-thurrott:</a></em></blockquote><p>first time I agree with Paul, since ages … have an upvote, unfortunately many people still stuck in 90s</p>
dontbeevil
<blockquote><em><a href="#450163">In reply to truerock2:</a></em></blockquote><p>It's not that Microsoft is evil – it's that they have a culture of winning at all costs.</p><p>They do not do things because it creates the best possible product from the users perspective. Microsoft does not think that way.</p><p><br></p><p>bhauahuahuauahauaauha…tell me about google and apple</p><p><br></p><p>Steve Jobs based his thinking and efforts on building the very best products – it was deeply imbeded in his DNA.</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p>bhuahauhauahua…. this is the best joke of the year</p>
dontbeevil
<p>LOL they needed to wait for MS help, after many years they couldn't fix their s**t</p>