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It’ll keep your computer from exploding! Maybe!
The importance of regular updates and bugfixes for web browsers cannot be overstated. Putting aside the fact that the internet and its easy browsing is now a vital part of our lives, I almost always have my browser open, even if I’m not using it. While I’m playing games, while I’m writing something, or while I’m listening to music, it’s sitting open in the background. Now, I could just close it if I wanted to conserve processing power, but I think I’d rather it just not use as much. That’s what Google’s working on for Chrome, and they’re pretty excited about it.
On Google’s Chromium Blog, detailing the latest updates about the desktop and mobile versions of the Chrome browser, they spoke at length about the new updates to Chrome version 89, released near the start of the month. According to the post, one of the development team’s major focuses with this version of Chrome was reducing the browser’s processing burden.
“In Chrome M89, we’re seeing significant memory savings on Windows–up to 22% in the browser process, 8% in the renderer, and 3% in the GPU. Even more than that, we’ve improved browser responsiveness by up to 9%. We’ve achieved this by using PartitionAlloc, our own advanced memory allocator, which is optimized for low allocation latency, space efficiency, and security,” the post reads.
Google Chrome 89 for Android brings faster loading times https://t.co/1If6TIW0T4
— David Kisamfu (@thedextazlab) March 12, 2021
Version 89 also made changes to how the browser uses and discards memory. “Chrome now reclaims up to 100MiB per tab, which is more than 20% on some popular sites, by discarding memory that the foreground tab is not actively using, such as big images you’ve scrolled off screen,” the post reads.
Google also spared some extra thought specifically to Mac users, saying that “we’re seeing up to 65% improvement on Apple Energy Impact score for tabs in the background, keeping your Mac cooler and those fans quiet.”
