Microsoft has brought the latest idea to improve laptop battery life. The idea can be beneficial for not only revamped Edge but also for Google Chrome. Actually, it is a method of saving battery life when playing online video in a browser. According to Microsoft, the new idea will eliminate unnecessary disk caching when watching videos. The played videos add media content to the HTTP cache and create some drawbacks.
Shawn Pickett is a senior software engineer at Microsoft. He explained that streaming media content stores cache in disk during media play which means the disk is kept active and consumes battery power. Further, this activeness of the disk can potentially prevent power saving modes to let the operating system work efficiently. Hence it becomes necessary to prevent media from storing cache in the disk for a better laptop battery life.
This low battery life is found only in those systems that usually play videos and the viewers are mostly just rewinding the video to watch. In such a scenario, there is no source to prevent disk caching and this causes the battery life to go down. While rewinding and watching the same video again and again, stored cache is used more to consume the battery.
Pickett also noted, “Since the existing Media Source implementation already maintains the most recent content in memory, the user will still be able to engage in common scenarios such as scrubbing backward a couple of seconds during playback without needing to re-acquire the content from the network. The existing seek responsiveness will be maintained in these cases.”
