Google last week promised to lower the power appetite of Chrome on the Mac to make its browser more competitive with Apple’s Safari.

“One of the big complaints about Chrome currently is that it’s a battery hog, especially on Mac where Safari seems to do better,” acknowledged Peter Kasting, a senior software engineer on the Chrome UI (user interface) team, in a Google+ post last Wednesday.

Kasting described several areas where the Chrome team had made progress in reducing the browser’s power consumption on OS X. Among the steps taken so far, Kasting said, were lowering the priority of background tab rendering and curtailing the number of times the browser “wakes” from a lower-power mode to see if it needs to do something. A high number of “wakes” can result in faster page rendering, but is more CPU-intensive, and thus eats more power.

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