While profiling Chrome's idle performance with procexp on Windows I've noticed that the chrome://extensions page does approximately 110 context switches per second. This happens even when the extensions page is not visible and Chrome is minimized.

This means that the extensions page is preventing the CPU from going to sleep and is thus wasting power. The total CPU consumed is about .10% on my twenty core machine, so about 2% of a core.

Minimizing power/CPU consumption during idle is important in order to maximize battery life.

This function is one of the "hot" functions in the profile, presumably it is being called on a timer:
    /**
     * Updates an HTML element for the extension metadata given in |extension|.
     * @param {!chrome.developerPrivate.ExtensionInfo} extension A dictionary of
     *     extension metadata.
     * @param {!Element} wrapper The extension wrapper element to update.
     * @private
     */
    updateWrapper_: function(extension, wrapper) {

I'm marking this as Windows only for now but I suspect it also occurs on other operating systems.