Chrome version 57 was released yesterday with an important feature that most of you may not even notice. Starting with this version, Chrome will throttle individual background tabs by limiting the timer fire rate for background tabs using excessive power.

That’s something that Google’s Chromium team finally did to prevent background tabs from killing your laptop’s battery. According to their own data, the throttling could lead to 25% fewer busy background tabs, meaning that 25 percent fewer tabs to suck up your battery power.

However, there will be a few exceptions. Tabs playing audio or maintaining real-time connections like WebSockets or WebRTC won’t be affected, stuff like video chat app and persistent messaging apps like Slack. That’s actually a good approach. If the background throttling isn’t handled smartly and properly, stuff users expect to work in the background will break.

Overall, it’s a very welcome feature to almost all Chrome users. If you are one of those having many tabs open all the time, upgrade to the latest version of Chrome by going to Settings > About and check to make sure they are installed.