Chrome 45 to Use Less Memory, Power
Chrome 45 to Use Less Memory, Power
Google Chrome is about to get a speed bump.
With Thursday’s launch of Chrome 45, Google is promising “a ton of improvements to make your browsing use less memory and power.”
Chrome lets you “continue where you left off,” or return to the tab you were looking at when you last closed the browser. But that can be labor-intensive, so with Chrome 45, you’ll find tabs restored from most to least recently viewed, “so you get to see the most important tabs faster,” Google said.
The new Chrome does more than just browse the Internet, though. It now detects if your computer is running low on resources, and automatically stops restoring tabs in an effort to save memory. Just click to refresh later, if necessary.
Google has also trained Chrome to identify when a webpage isn’t busy, and use that free time to clean up unused memory.
“In practice we found that this reduced website memory usage by 10 percent on average, but the effect is even more dramatic on complex Web apps,” product manager Ryan Schoen wrote in a blog post.
On Gmail, Chrome 45 freed up nearly a quarter of the memory used by the tab—”a significant improvement compared to Chrome 43,” Google said.
In June, Google started, auto-pausing non-essential Adobe Flash content on its beta channel. When Chrome users visit a website running Flash, the browser automatically halts content that isn’t central to the page. “Our testing has shown that turning on this setting makes your battery last up to 15 percent longer depending on your operating system, so over the next few weeks we’ll begin turning on this feature by default for all users,” Schoen wrote.
“As the Web evolves and sites take advantage of increasing capabilities, Chrome’s performance—how fast pages load, how smooth scrolling is, how much memory is consumed, and how long your battery lasts—becomes even more important,” Schoen said.
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