“improves battery life by up to 0.5%”
To me this line is quite ridiculous.
We all know that Chrome is now the main responsible for battery consumption on any laptop and could be optimized much more.
You mean the total energy saved across all devices? The only context in which anybody could give a fig about that is as it relates to total global energy consumption, of which it is an utterly neglible speck.
Edit: Had a go at putting some numbers on that for fun, and will partially retract my comment (no I don't, see below).
If it takes [1] around 0.01kWh to charge a smartphone, there are [2] around 6 billion smartphones, each is charged once a day and this saves 0.05 (wrong,see below) of that usage, the saving is on the order of 3GWh/day, i.e. around 125MW.
Total global energy consumption is [3] around 20 TW, so the saving is around 0.0006% of it, and this is a very generous estimate (chrome isn't all the consumption of a smartphone, not all phones are in active use and charging once a day, etc).
That said, in absolute terms it's more than I would have guessed - comparable to the electricity consumption of a small town (no, much less, probably less than the output of a single wind turbine - see below).
Everything is neglible in comparison to global energy consumption though, because we use energy for so many different things.
If everyone who is in a position to reduce the energy consumption of their small part significantly does their part then it will add up to a significant effort.
I don't disagree at all, but the comment I was responding to was saying that globally it's "massive" which it really isn't. Every little helps, but this is little.
Yes, Google (and other global companies) actually cares about that. They work on fleet-level changes to make such differences worth it. It might not matter to you though.
What fleet-level changes are you referring to? The energy saving is certainly a nice thing (environmentally if nothing else) but it's not energy they are paying for. I don't see how it would change Google's operations in any way.