Google Chrome Now Gobbles Up 20% Less Memory On Windows

Google says that the latest Google Chrome version comes with major memory savings on Windows systems and improves energy consumption and overall responsiveness.

Google Chrome 89, which rolled out earlier this week, comes with significant Windows memory management improvements, with the browser process requiring up to 22% less memory.

According to Mark Chang, Chrome Product Manager, the new version also boasts 8% memory savings in the renderer and roughly 3% in the GPU.

“We’ve achieved this by using PartitionAlloc, our own advanced memory allocator, which is optimized for low allocation latency, space efficiency, and security,” Chang explained.

Google has used the security-focused PartitionAlloc extensively for a while now for memory management within Blink, the company’s browser rendering.

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Cookie Monster on a diet

Google says that similar memory savings have been achieved in the latest Chrome version on browser tab memory management, with 8% less RAM needed (up to 1GiB).

“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,” Chang added.

“Chrome is also shrinking its memory footprint in background tabs on macOS, something we’ve been doing on other platforms for a while.”

The Android version was also repackaged, which led to faster page loads and start-up times, and 5% less memory usage.

To top it all off, Google improved the web browser’s overall responsiveness by up to 9% and achieved a 65% Apple Energy Impact score improvement for background tabs.

With the release of Google Chrome 87 in November 2020, Google optimized the web browser performance leading to 25% faster start-ups and 7% faster page loads while using less memory.

Google Chrome 85 delivered up to 10% faster page loads due to a new compiler optimization technique known as Profile Guided Optimization (PGO).

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“We’re very excited to bring you these performance improvements and have much more to come, so stay tuned,” Chang concluded.