Google could change its Chrome browser to save battery life on your Windows 11 laptop

Google is constantly developing its Chrome browser, of course, and an inbound tweak could be good news for eking out a bit more battery life on Windows 11 portables.

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Windows Latest spotted a new 'audio offload' feature that's being worked on for Chrome, at least based on a recent commit which describes an "experiment for audio offloading on Windows."

So, this is by definition just in its experimental phase right now, but the idea is to take some of the strain off the CPU by redirecting the task of playing the audio in a web page to the PC's audio chip. And that lessened processor usage should help to save a bit of battery for extra longevity on the move with Windows 11 laptops.

Windows supports hardware-offloaded audio processing, Windows Latest observes, and in fact this is an idea Microsoft flagged up a long time ago (five years back, in fact).

So why has nothing been done with this concept? Well, that's a good question, and not one we can answer, but it seems Google may run with the idea yet (and if it comes to Chromium, it'll surely debut in Microsoft Edge, too).

Although given this is at such an early stage, we wouldn't bank on that - Google might think better of implementing this audio offloading plan. Although it sounds like a pretty sensible move, so we don't see why it shouldn't progress further in testing. We'll certainly be keeping an eye on Chrome for what happens with this concept going forward.

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