If you also belong to the millions of users who work on every day on Google Chrome, then you must have had a sure shot experience at least once when your computer had slowed down while using the browser on a daily basis.
With the new updates coming up every now and then, the websites and the online tools are always expecting more from the computers and this has become a huge burden to the browsers especially if they do not come with great memory management. The Google Chrome team has been working hard constantly to improve the browser and is ready with a new update which will cut its memory use by almost 50 percent. According to a report by CNET, the Chrome team has added a new JavaScript engine to the Chrome Version 54 and this will make memory usage to be lower on the sites that have been programmed using JavaScript when compared to its previous version.
The Google Chrome version 55 is expected to be launched on the 6th December 2016. The new version will see improvements in the browser’s performance especially if the device you are working on does not have a lot of memory to start off with, for example, like many low-cost smartphones, and also when you are running Chrome by opening multiple tabs in it or if other apps are opened at the same time.
Results of the Perceptive Experimentation
The Google team working on the V8 JavaScript engine has said in a report that it has reduced the memory usage significantly on many websites which will help the browser to improve its performance. The websites including Reddit, The New York Times, YouTube, and many others were chosen to gauge the enhanced performance features of the improved Chrome 55 browser.
The testing reported that Chrome 55, on an average, had used a total of less than 50 percent of the device’s RAM memory when compared to the previous Chrome version 53, which was updated in September to give priority to the HTML5 content instead of the Adobe Flash. During the testing, the most noticeable observation that the team made was with the mobile New York Times, whose average benchmark of accumulated V8 memory consumption was reduced by almost 66 percent. Overall, almost 50 percent reduction was observed for the average V8 heap size on these sets of benchmarks.
There has been another update which offers optimization of the memory, which reduces its consumption on devices which have a low memory but bulky desktop and mobile machines. By reducing the V8 heap page size to 512 KB from 1 MB has resulted in a smaller memory imprint and not many live objects will be present. The overall memory split will be lowered by 2X times. This reduction in memory usage will allow the V8 to perform more compaction work. This is because small work chunks will allow doing more work in parallel with the memory compaction threads.
As the web browser is moving ahead with many updates, the entire focus of the Chrome team seems to be on the small-time trivial devices which have a RAM memory of something in between 512 MB and 1 GB.
Still, if you are someone who is conscious and considerate about the performance issues due to opening many apps and multiple tabs, or someone who has a system with a whole lot of memory, then you would probably not see much of a difference with the updated version of Chrome 55.
The updated Google Chrome version 55 is available for download for the Windows, Mac, iOS, and Linux systems and it is expected to be rolled out on December 6th, 2016.