While Chrome has become one of the most popular browsers in the world, it’s still one of the least efficient ones out there. For years now its use of resources, whether it’s battery power, processing, or memory, has been well documented – and amply complained about. Luckily, Google is working on improving things with an upcoming release.
After the Chrome team decided to lower battery usage in the past 10 versions of the browser, it now looks like they’re ready to finally minimize Chrome’s memory use. In a blog post, the engineering team describes how tweaking the V8 Javascript engine, and manually coding some fixes, it managed to achieve some very impressive results.
According to their tests, Chrome version M55, expected to be publicly launched by the end of the year, managed to use up substantially less memory. Going by memory used by V8 alone, there’s about a 50% reduction on average, as the chart below shows.
In general terms, the team focused on reducing memory consumption on devices with less than 512 MB of RAM. In the next few months, before public release, the team promised to also focus on devices equipped with 512MB - 1GB of memory. As you can tell, these optimizations, while impressive, will only be really noticeable on low-end phones, or older devices.
Still, we’re hoping some of these improvements translate into real benefits for those of us on modern devices as well. And after all, Google’s newfound will to finally improve resource consumption in Chrome is very welcome. Here’s hoping the engineering team doesn’t stop there.
Source: V8 Blog
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