Chrome on Mac Now Offers 18 Hours of YouTube, Says Google

Google announced on Tuesday further enhancements to its Chrome browser, making the latter more energy efficient for Apple Mac users, specifically MacBook customers.

With the latest release of Chrome, 2022 M2 MacBook 13-inch users can now “browse for 17 hours or watch YouTube for 18 hours,” says Google. This was possible due to a “ton of optimizations under the hood.”

Google says with Chrome’s Energy Saver mode turned on, it offers an extra 30 minutes of battery life, as tested with Chrome version 110.0.5481.100 on a MacBook Pro (13”, M2, 2022 with 8 GB RAM running MacOS Ventura 13.2.1) this month, and measured using their open-source benchmark suite.

But these battery gains aren’t only for M2 MacBook users. Google says performance gains will be available on older models as well.

To make these improvements, Google says it fine-tuned iframes, tweaked Javascript timers, streamlined data structures and eliminated unnecessary redraws. You can read all the fine technical details over at Google’s blog post here.