You are not imagining things if you think that Chrome makes the battery life of your laptop shorter. It is actually a known issue and Chrome still has an issue with power usage management.
A closer look reveals that it could be caused by Windows’ timer resolution that forces the processor to get prepared consistently for any kind of task. This allows the browsers to responds faster to our inputs, at just one millisecond. By default, Microsoft responds to a task in 15.6 miliseconds. So, when the Chrome is running, it wakes the processor of our laptop 1,000 times each second, compared to just 64 when Chrome is closed. This causes significant power drain and worse, Chrome isn’t the only with such a coding misstep.
This issue doesn’t affect Windows 8/8.1 laptops, because it uses “tickles” kernel, like OS X and Linux; which allows the processor to run in power-saving mode longer while the app is running. However, many users are still using laptops with Windows 7 and even, Windows XP. It means, these machines are still using ticking kernel. Fortunately, Google’s Chrome team has put the bug at higher priority list and we should see a fix soon.
Laptop News