Update March 2015: Chrome now avoids raising the timer frequency unnecessarily, and as of summer 2020 Chrome will not raise the timer frequency above 125 Hz when on battery power, making it a non-issue for battery life. Among other things they just sample the timer interrupt frequency at a point in time, when many programs adjust the timer interrupt frequency many times per second. While increasing the timer frequency might make sense for an application that is trying to maintain a steady frame rate it does not make sense for WPF to leave the timer frequency raised even when there is no animation going on (discussion on a WPF issue is here).