Forum Discussion
Top feedback summary for September 24
One thing I noticed with these newer build is that watching videos doesn't write to my drive like all the other browser do. This is important if you have an SSD, to reduce wear or if you have an HDD to prevent slowdown. Even if that benefit comes at the expense of a bit more memory usage, that's fine.
Deleted The flag I think you're talking about is called Turn off caching of streaming media to disk. Looking for it now, it seems to be removed, which means it's here to stay. It's purpose is to save large amounts of battery life without sacrificing too much performance. If you'd like more information, check out this article: https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/technology/google-chrome-exhausting-devices-battery-life-microsoft-comes-to-the-rescue/1680946/
For those of you who don't feel like checking, its cool, here's the important parts:
"these days media content is cached to disk through acquisition and playback, keeping the said disk active while this process continues;
Microsoft said that it increases power consumption and can also avert certain lower-power modes from being engaged into the operating system;
The change will prevent the caching of certain media content to disk in order to improve upon the device battery life;
Chromium stops ‘streaming media content from caching to disk where possible' to improve battery life by stopping unnecessary media caching;
the proposal is aimed at media playback instances where the user is watching content and, on occasions, is accessing other content as well.;
disabling the disk caching has no drawback as the existing Media Source implementation already keeps the recent content in memory, the user will still be able to engage in usual tasks like going backwards a few seconds during playback without the need to get the content from the network again. The seek responsiveness, at present, will be kept in these instances;
A Google engineer demonstrated that the change adopted ” will avert the caching of certain media content to disk in order to improve the device battery life for its users."
This change is here to stay. I think Microsoft should add a high performance mode where the power saving features are turned off for people who are plugged in on desktops and laptops or value performance over battery life.